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I am a PG 23 year old who can't help but question if there is any relationship of statistical significance between depression (and other mental illnesses like Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder, for instance) and extremely high intelligence (i.e. giftedness).

What do you all think? Do any of you have experience with this and know how to get a handle on it?


I am really hoping to get some answers; I know I am suffering a lot from mental afflictions and I always have. I don't want to feel alone in this anymore.
Originally Posted by QT3.1414
I am a PG 23 year old who can't help but question if there is any relationship of statistical significance between depression (and other mental illnesses like Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder, for instance) and extremely high intelligence (i.e. giftedness).

What do you all think? Do any of you have experience with this and know how to get a handle on it?

I am really hoping to get some answers; I know I am suffering a lot from mental afflictions and I always have. I don't want to feel alone in this anymore.
I am sorry to hear of your afflictions, but whether there is a correlation between giftedness and mental illness in general is a separate question from what kind of help you need.
Originally Posted by QT3.1414
What do you all think? Do any of you have experience with this and know how to get a handle on it?

I am really hoping to get some answers; I know I am suffering a lot from mental afflictions and I always have. I don't want to feel alone in this anymore.

Different mental afflictions require different things to "get a handle on".

For instance, schizophrenia generally requires anti-psychotic medication, whereas severe depression may be helped by ECT treatments.

My wife has a good friend with bipolar disorder who apparently wants to try to deal with it through distance running (exercise), rather than medication. I'm not seeing how that's a good idea, since I've never seen bipolar disorder controlled without medications.

You are asking a medical/psychological question here, which is why Bostonian gave the reply he gave.

I don't know of any "gifted/mental health" forums or support groups, but then I'm generally professionally dealing with the bottom portion of the IQ distribution, so it's not something that I would look for.
I have wondered this myself sometimes. I don't know the answer to your question exactly. But from what I've read, I believe that gifted people are less likely to seek treatment for their mental health issues. This is because they are more likely to continue to function successfully in their jobs and public settings. They are better able to cope with the symptoms of mental illness, but the underlying issues and inner suffering go untreated.
A friend of mine's husband who is gifted suffered from Bi-polar several years ago and was successfully treated with medication. He no longer needs it and has stabilized very well.

I think there could be a correlation, but whether it's due to extremes of excitability or some kind of cognitive reciprocity I have no idea. I myself am HG and have always been prone to emotional intensity as well as OCD and anxiety like behaviours.

I look at it this way. What is giftedness on a neurological level? More neurons firing? So if you have all that extra wiring hooked up, you won't just be "typically" sad, you'll be REALLY sad. The same can be said for any emotion: fear, anger, joy, etc. The more circuits there are firing, the bigger the emotion.

I remember DD10 having an extreme meltdown when she was about 4 over something that would not provoke such a reaction in a typical kid, and DH just couldn't wrap his head around it. I tried to explain "it's because she's smart" ...he got really annoyed (not being gifted himself and having any frame of reference to judge from).

sigh.

Anyway, know that you're not alone. This is an intense road. If your feelings and behaviours are extreme enough to interfere with your life and possibly cause you or someone else danger, then you should seek some help (like my friend's husband). On the other hand, if you're just intense and feel ostracized and alone because of it, not to worry, because you're not alone smile
Here's a national spelling bee champion with bipolar disorder (who I know personally, which is why I know this).

"Nevertheless, it took Pennington nine years to get his postgraduate degrees at the University of California-Berkeley. During that period, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which he believes may have prolonged his academic quest. "That was one thing I didn't even know about myself when I was in the National Spelling Bee," he says. "I'm generally quite open about it. It shows that many people with bipolar disorder are high functioning professional members of society. I do all the things I need to do to keep it in check. I keep healthy, take the right medicines and try to live right. I guess we all have our crosses to bear, everybody's got their 'something.'"

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1624100_1624098_1623359,00.html #ixzz2WhvItcHR
There are correlation studies out there with IQ and a variety of mental health disorders. But you should be aware as you go looking at those things that definitions for "schizophrenia" and "bipolar" and "depression" were very, VERY different fifty years ago, and that is when many of those studies were completed.

They did find, interestingly, that schizophrenia and affective disorders were considerably more common in gifted persons-- and that the bell curve of cognitive ability basically looked very much as though it correlated to a linear probability map that showed increasing incidence as one went to the right on the cognitive ability distribution.

There are two important caveats about those studies in addition to the DSM-shifting-definitions one that I listed above:

a) there is little question in MY mind that this was an era in which many researchers in the field were probably biased toward finding something when they were looking for those effects. Pay very close attention to sampling methodology. Terman's group does NOT show this effect, as I recall.

b) not all mental health disorders are created equal there, but remember that affective disorders in general terms are quite common among the general population anyway. So saying that 40% of HG+ persons will have one of those disorders in their lifetime.... meh... maybe that is statistically significant and maybe it's just not a large enough sample size... because recall, too, that you're considering a TINY fraction of the general population-- unless your sample is hundreds of THOSE individuals, errors are likely to be large.

The effect IS striking enough, however, that everyone in terminal-degree-granting institutions is well aware of it. The rate of psychosis among my graduate department seems to have been about 8-10% over a period of some 15 years that I'm aware of. Pretty sure that incidence is nowhere NEAR that in the general population, though I don't know exactly what it is. Most of those people experienced psychotic breaks as a result of apparent schizoaffective disorders. This is one of those anecdotal things that 'everyone knows' who deals with large numbers of HG/HG+ people, but few studies with good design have ever been done on that cohort to tease apart just HOW real the effect actually is.

I'm also with Jon here-- I've seen a lot of bipolar up close and personal... let's just say very personal... and medication is the only thing that works to control it. Period. It might be fine to dabble a bit with milder presentations, but for those people that are BP-I, just... no. I watched the smartest person I've ever personally known destroy everything-- repeatedly, over a period of decades-- trying.

Also be aware that many mental health disorders are the result of epigenetic/genetic factors. So find out the scoop in your extended family. That can really help when you're trying to find out what issues to explore with a professional's help.

It's good to get help and develop better coping skills. I'm VERY glad that having a mental illness is losing it's fearful stigma. smile





Here's a link to the Davidson database list of articles of articles about psychological issues in profoundly gifted asolescents, including succesfully completed suicide, existential depression, and articles from James Webb who wrote the popular book, "The misdiagnosis and dual diagnosis" guide book.
http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/browse_articles_188.aspx

I have read here that people seek the services of gifted specialist psychiatrists like Dr. Amand because psychological problems have different needs in gifted than non-gifted people. I've seen him talked about for little kids who have ADHD plus high giftedness. I can't tell if that's only for learning disorders or all other problems, or if his services extend past school aged kids.
http://www.amendpsych.com/

I don't know if this is helpful, but at your age if you're not doing anything else you could go to the college and take psycology classes and learn all about it. The college students are likely to be gifted and the professor moreso. You can learn as much as you can there as anywhere else. Maybe you'll learn something nobody else learned yet about 2e (which they call twice exceptional-having two labels, giftedness plus something else.) You'll be finding answers and be less alone. I think twenty-one's too old for job corp and you may not want to join the army to get a scholarship, but there are pell grants to help you and I think they help pay for your books if you ask the college counselor. It's worth asking about.

Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
The effect IS striking enough, however, that everyone in terminal-degree-granting institutions is well aware of it. The rate of psychosis among my graduate department seems to have been about 8-10% over a period of some 15 years that I'm aware of. Pretty sure that incidence is nowhere NEAR that in the general population, though I don't know exactly what it is.
During graduate school, when I doubted I would be able to finish and worried that I thrown away X years of my life, I was at times *very* unhappy. Finishing and getting a good job fixed that. I wonder if graduate school attracts people with psychological problems or creates them.
The running hypothesis (at least in our lab) when I was studying neuroscience was that it was a perfect confluence of epigenetic factors brought to bear on a particularly susceptible population.



In other words, that much pressure makes some people break with reality to escape it.


In other words, Bostonian, I think it's probably both of those things.


You do, however, see the same general phenomena in POW's, so clearly applying relentless, all-consuming pressure to human beings is... unwise... to begin with.

For PhD students, "Stockholm" means a lot more than Nobel. My DH and I have speculated that it's a mark of how non-violent HG/+ people are as a general rule that there aren't more instances of students going postal on their committees around oral qualifiers. It's remarkable to me that it remains quite rare.


The military also does a LOT of heavy-duty mental health screening/stress-testing for high pressure service occupations. My FIL shared some of the stuff they put him through as one of the original Nuclear Sub chiefs/officers, and it is really thorough. So they certainly recognize that there is a risk, and want to carefully evaluate prospective sailors before turning them into nuclear submariners, where the pressure of the environment can serve to destabilize a person with the right set of characteristics. The space program also did/does a lot of psych evals as part of screening potential trainees.







Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
The effect IS striking enough, however, that everyone in terminal-degree-granting institutions is well aware of it. The rate of psychosis among my graduate department seems to have been about 8-10% over a period of some 15 years that I'm aware of. Pretty sure that incidence is nowhere NEAR that in the general population, though I don't know exactly what it is. Most of those people experienced psychotic breaks as a result of apparent schizoaffective disorders. This is one of those anecdotal things that 'everyone knows' who deals with large numbers of HG/HG+ people, but few studies with good design have ever been done on that cohort to tease apart just HOW real the effect actually is.
I'm not aware of that high an incidence of psychosis (in a largish sample in a very high ranking department in a mathematical field) but interruptions for mental illness of one kind or another are easily that high, and there's a culture here of keeping psychosis known only on a need-to-know basis anyway, so could be.

Doing a PhD is an extraordinarily stressing experience, though, even compared with the rest of an academic career. The kind of stress probably varies a lot with field, and especially with whether you're working as an individual or as a member of a team, though. Stockholm syndrome is probably more of an issue for the latter - for the former, there often aren't people close enough to seem like captors! For the people near me, it's basically 3-4 years of working on your own to make a substantial new contribution to knowledge - as your first experience of research, without the wide background knowledge and the secure network of support from colleagues in the field that you'll have later. The UK does not have the taught course element of graduate school that is usual in the US (historically, because undergraduate courses go deeper): typically, students arrive at a new place where they know noone and are immediately thrust into doing that research. Even those who aren't made ill by it are, universally, made miserable by it at some point. This is why one should almost never advise someone who isn't sure to do a PhD.

Frankly, my intuition is that you don't have to invoke special susceptibility in the HG+ population to explain the level of mental illness we see. The environment is sufficient to explain it. It's far worse for the people who come in without sufficient challenge in their background, those whose self-image involves not finding things hard.

In case it's relevant to anyone reading, let me point at the Depressed Academics community.
True-- and it's also taking an age/maturity cohort which is probably at highest risk for an initial psychotic break to begin with-- assuming that people who are HG+ tend to mask less severe symptoms fairly successfully up to that point, which does seem to be true.

Statistically speaking, mid-to-late adolescence through the early 20's is when many serious mental health disorders emerge to begin with.



I'll just give a hug.

((hug))

I think that the book Living with Intensity has a very great chapter that explains well how Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration would apply to giftedness and depression.
I CANNOT thank you all enough for all of these kind links, facts, and ideas. IT really does make me feel like I am not so alone anymore. This is such an awesome forum!


I feel the same way. Here is a link to the book I mentioned:
http://www.amazon.com/Living-With-Intensity-Understanding-Excitability/dp/0910707898

I also think James Webb explains it very well here:
http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10554.aspx
The book "Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses" came out in 2005, a 2nd edition came out a few years after this thread began:
Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults: ADHD, Bipolar, OCD, Asperger's, Depression, and Other Disorders (2nd edition), authored by James T Webb, Edward E Amend, Paul Beljan (2016)
Originally Posted by book description
Gifted children and adults are frequently misdiagnosed, particularly those who are twice-exceptional (2e).
Here is a link to Dr. Webb discussing Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses
https://videos.med.wisc.edu/videos/32540 (2011)

Evidently, it can be important to have a psychologist or professional who is familiar with gifted.
The two lists above are courtesy of Hoagies Gifted Education Page.
Here is a list maintained courtesy of SENG (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted).

This also may be of interest - Counseling Gifted Adults - A Case Study, by Paula Prober
Is the thread from 2013 or am I reading wrong? grin

I can give some more detailed personal thoughts on mental health and giftedness, (mostly through sharing my own experiences and hypotheses about giftedness I have derived from it). I have spent a bit of time thinking about this.

But it might get a bit lengthy (even if I shorten each point as much as possible), so I will only if OP is (still) interested. (Or maybe I should open a new "mental health and giftedness" thread? Anyone interested?).

In the mean time, I'll still complement indigo's list of resources, and throw Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child into the mix.

We had been discussing it in another thread .

In a nutshell, she develops a (somehow psychodynamical) theory of how being emotionally sensitive as a child can result in feelings of either depression or grandiosity in adulthood, when growing up in family constellations where the parents show certain types of emotional dysregulations.

Yes, this thread is from 2013. Occasionally old threads get a bit of attention from the online search engines and search spiders crawling the web. This can be observed via the "Who's Online" feature (displayed in the left margin of the screen, on a laptop).

There are currently 243 - 227 - 228 - 234 - 246 - 259 search spiders accessing the forum. (The count can change quickly.)

If updated information is readily available which may be helpful to current/future readers of the thread... it seems that posting those updates is simply the right thing to do.
smile

Yes, a new thread exploring giftedness and mental health, might be helpful... maybe in the adult age forum? As most other sections of the forum are dedicated to helping parents guide their gifted offspring through the school years. Two more thoughts:
- If you start a thread on mental health, just be sure to follow forum rules to not disclose any personally identifying information regarding yourself or others.
- If you start a new thread, you might want to post a link to it, from this thread.
Please excuse my brisk question; it is an old habit of mine, from youth days spent on internet forums to mark a flag on reviving "dead threads". I take note of new ways to think about elder posts smile.

I'll post the link in here when I am done - hopefully this weekend or the next, when I find the time.
No problem, I'm sure others have questioned the revival of old threads, as well.
Especially anyone viewing an old thread at the time when it is updated, suddenly finding a new post at the end:
Fortuitous synchronicity...?!
smile
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