I haven't looked it up recently, but I seem to recall that on the whole, studies show that gifted people have about the same rates of depression, suicide, etc as the general population? Which would mean that no, gifted kids aren't that special in terms of socioemotional needs, on the whole. That's not to say that one's own gifted kid doesn't have special emotional needs, of course.
When last I looked, (and admittedly, it's been a while) rates of
affective disorder and particular schizoid disorders are, in fact elevated substantially at one end of the bell curve.
But in the
big picture sense, no, mental health and socioemotional dysfunction is no more common among those who are HG+ than it is among those who are NT.
But it is somewhat
different, based on a completely reasonable extrapolation of that information (which was from multiple studies, though none of them very high quality)-- so if you looked at the Terman data, for example, if you just look for "mental health" problems, no more common. If it's broken out further, though, some patterns emerge.
Existential depression seems quite common, for example, leading me to believe that some of those problems are likely genetic (and maybe linked to high IQ) and that others, particularly those in the anxiety and affective areas, might be
situational.Some of them are linked to task-avoidant/socially-prescribed perfectionism, for example-- that particular TYPE of perfectionism seems rare in those who are not HG+ in some domain.
That's not to say that disordered eating, procrastination, and existential depression can't be happening in someone who doesn't HAVE socially-prescribed perfectionism, but it is a wicked strong correlation in those who DO.
Again--the cure for this is internal
and it's external. Sufficiently challenging and supportive circumstances are the cure for those who are HG. Underperformance in circumstances that require THAT of HG+ persons is an expressway to existential angst.
