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.
