Depressive realism is the idea that people with depression judge the world more accurately than everyone else, and that what we call "normal" perception is actually a comfortable set of illusions. Director John Smith builds his film around that claim, opening with how societies construct the very idea of normality and how its definition shifts from culture to culture. He then interviews people living with depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder about how they perceive their surroundings compared to those without a diagnosis. The film widens from there to painters, musicians, and writers, who describe art-making as a way of externalizing a personal view of reality that differs from the consensus one. Neuroscientists and psychologists close out the interviews, explaining current research on how the brain constructs perception and how past experience shapes what a person takes to be simply "the world." The film moves between these three groups, clinical, artistic, and scientific, rather than settling the argument, leaving Smith's opening claim about depression and accurate perception as a question the viewer is left to weigh.