Hi, this is my first post here, I am making it as I am still searching for answers regarding my drop in IQ. I am currently 16 years old, and in a very tricky situation with school, which I'm trying to solve, and I think that knowing whether my drop in IQ is indicatory of a drop in actual ability, or whether I'm still gifted would help.

Before starting elementary school, between the ages of 5.5 and 6, I was tested to determine my eligibility for a gifted program, presumably with the WPPSI-III. I am quite confident that it was in fact an IQ test, as it was individually administered, and I remember some of the object assembly items. My mother recalls the score obtained as being in the 140s, but I believe that the cutoff for the gifted program was around 130, so even if her memory is faulty, I know that my score has dropped significantly.

In elementary school, I usually tested well on the achievement tests, especially reading comprehension, consistently scoring several years above grade level, yet I still had some trouble with math. It's my weakest subject, but I still tested okay in it during elementary school. As for my experience in elementary school, I was miserable most of the time. I was bored, most of my time was spent watching the clock to see when I could go home. I refused to do homework, and even once put it through a document shredder.

In 6th grade, I didn't get along with my teacher, so that was the worst year I had in elementary school. It was also the year where they did testing to determine eligibility for the gifted program in middle school. They switched from using individually administered tests to using the CogAT, which I didn't perform great on. I did okay verbally, but my NV scores were around average.

After that, I ended up missing a lot of middle school. I believe a lot of it was due to my delayed sleep phase syndrome, which wasn't diagnosed until recently. I missed over 300 school days in middle school.

In 2018, I was seeing a psychologist about some family issues, and about my struggles with school attendance. They never diagnosed my delayed sleep phase syndrome, but they did diagnose ASD, and they put me on a SSRI, which killed my appetite, causing me to lose a lot of weight. They tested me with the WISC around that time, determining me to be a "slow learner". I don't know if my weight loss and inability to eat around that time lowered the score, but I just thought that it was a factor that I should mention. The test was also in the morning, so I was pretty tired due to my sleep disorder, but again, I don't know if it could have caused that significant of a drop.

On the WISC, I obtained a slightly above average verbal score, but a very low processing speed score, in the 70s, and low average scores on the other performance indices. The FSIQ was in the 90s.

I did okay in High School when I was attending consistently, I got A's in all classes, but I was pretty bored, got sick, and then my sleep got off, which caused me to once again stop attending, causing me to fail classes. My high school GPA was 1.3. I didn't enroll for the 2019-2020 school year, as my school counselor reccomended going the GED route, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to do it, because of the math.

I originally wanted to go to college to study Molecular Biology, and I still do to an extent, but at this point I simply feel that it isn't realistic, so I'm planning to pursue a career in either retail, or food service.

What do you think caused my drop in IQ? I guess maybe I was precocious at first, and that inflated my first score, but as I got older, my below-average cognitive abilities became apparent? I'm wondering if my hatred toward school in Elementary school was due to me being placed into a gifted class while possessing below-average intelligence.