Why highly intelligent people suffer from more mental and physical disorders | Hacker News Reader

Why highly intelligent people suffer from more mental and physical disorders

bigthink.com

41 pointsserverlessmom11 comments

The more accurate headline would be "American mensa members suffer from more mental and physical disorders" because the data was taken exclusively from American Mensa Society members. I'm actually quite curious why they did this because this seems to be a somewhat obvious source of potentially severe bias. It implicitly assumes that the distribution of mensa members is representative/identical to the distribution of all people in the 98th percentile, and that seems unlikely to be true.

I think any study that focuses on IQ essentially needs to use data from an area with global compulsory IQ tests. And there are places within Scandinavia that hit the mark there: compulsory military enlistment that comes with an IQ test creates a perfect test bed for data.

The link between intelligence and mental illness is a myth.

It's like that story people like to quote about the mathematician analyzing armoring planes in WWII.

The parts that always came back without bullet holes were the critical parts. There was no magic protecting those parts; those were the parts that needed more armor.

Selection effect.

Similarly, people who are mentally ill and able to be open about it, have a lot of critical compensating qualities, because if they didn't, they'd be invisible, homeless, institutionalized, or dead.

Their talents and abilities aren't caused by the illness, they are what is critical to compensate for it and make it safe to tell others.

Correlation vs causality. I've read another paper in a French acadamic review another study showing a correlation.

In all cases, as always, only a large meta-analysis of these studies may lead to a conclusion of a correlation.

And if that correlation exists, having a mental illness doesn't imply you're smarter and many super smart are in good mental health.

And where do we draw a line between mental illness and a person having some issues to solve - as everybody does? Psychiatrists have assessment tools but those are by nature linked to a particular society. So the line varies from a society to another.

For my part, I think that many western societies are pathogenic by their organization. People with some level of responsibilities are under an enormous pressure from their top management, in order to meet their exorbitant level of wealth extortion from the employees and workers. They do well financially in comparison to workers but they don't get rich. They are the one paying the psychological price of extorting that wealth, while having enough information and intelligence to understand that they won't ever belong to the 1% and being the motor of this atrocious excessive form of capitalism.

Another sort of issues is to not fitting well with others.

Or you're super smart but don't know what to do of your life. You understand too well how the system works towards a bad future (climate crisis, depletion of biodiversity, social inequality getting higher and higher, probable wars to come between the West and Russia and the China, democracies turning into authoritarian regimes...).

But I do agree that Mensa is certainly a place with higher proportion of "issues". One needs to have personal issues to want to belong to a private club of "super IQ" only. The principle of it is totally absurd. If I were to date someone who belongs to Mensa, that is definitely a red flag.

I could belong to Mensa according to a test I took with a psychologist ; that's 2% of the population so we are many who could. All the Mensa members I met couldn't help dropping their membership in the conversation - like some can't help letting you know they studied at Harvard 25 years ago. Smart people are as idiotic, pedantic, boring to hell as the rest of the population.

To finish, IQ tests ate tailored to pinpoint a very specific form of intelligence, conceptual and verbal. An human being is much larger that. So the whole principle of these tests ate dubious - except for the very few reasons where they can help.

For example, when you see a smart kid doing bad at school, an IQ test may prove that the cause of his/her issues is not the academic potential. Maybe for certain specific jobs, but I don't know for which they are really suited for and on what grounds.

I have known for decades that my intelligence causes serious mental health issues for me personally. It absolutely is a double-edged sword.

Sadly, I am not sure how this result is either surprising or useful, because most places still effectively criminalize (or at least heavily penalize) those with mental health issues. Anyone working or living in positions where such issues could be viewed as a liability would be putting themselves at risk to even seek treatment.

> criminalize

Taken advantage of the mental person or seeing this person as weak.

It's the same pseudoautosomal, tnf-alpha-adjacent, and crhr1-and-2 adjacent regulatory differences.

If whatever genetic feature that has made someone more intelligent didn't come with downsides, then we would expect it to be more prevalent in the population.

Excepting any that have only recently arisen, but I'd assume those to be rare.

Only if intelligence leads to greater fitness in the Darwinian sense. Don't confuse higher socio-economic status with Darwinian fitness. Plenty of people of quite modest intelligence and limited achievement are successfully passing their genes on to the next generation.

Recommended reading: The Marching Morons by Cyril Kornbluth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons

Ding ding. The reason I love hn!

Never heard of that book and from the wiki entry it sounds amazing and hopefully not prescient.

It's got what plants crave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com