Predictive processing (PP) accounts often characterize mental illness as maladaptive and epistemically distorting due to mismatches between brain-generated top-down models and bottom-up sensory inputs, with this review identifying exceptions. First, hypervigilance in trauma survivors with PTSD or depression may sustain desirable gaps between anticipated problems and actual harms that would otherwise occur. Second, PP defenders have argued that depressive slowdowns follow from maladaptive…
