Relationships between Depression and High Intellectual Potential (2012)
hindawi.com
hindawi.com
http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10489.aspx
Brilliant kids who were held back in their age group, following the "inclusion" theory, were far more likely to become depressed, and to fail as adults.
Brilliant kids who were not held back and allowed to progress according to their own skills and talents, following the "acceleration" theory, were more likely to become well adjusted successful adults.
The relationship between intelligence and depression in children is explained by this study. There is a third factor - how the education is handled.
Imagine taking a person of average intelligence and placing them in a class for profoundly developmentally disabled children, children who can not feed themselves or talk. Make them sit in this environment daily for 12 years, as the only person of normal intelligence in the room. Spend hours each day, for years on end, showing them over and over how to use a spoon. A normal person forced to experience this would rapidly become suicidal or crazed.
That is what it is like for exceptionally gifted children who are mainstreamed. Take an 8 yr old child who is doing algebra and calculus on his own and force him to study tables of "addition facts" for an entire year. Punish him if he won't fill in the worksheets and then sit quietly if completed, or raise his hand to receive more worksheets that are the same thing, to keep him busy and out of trouble. This child becomes frustrated, and within a few months, will become depressed and hopeless. The "good ones" stay quiet and contemplate suicide. The "bad ones" start to act up, and nowadays are prescribed antipsychotic tranquilizers. One of the biggest new markets for antipsychotics is in forcing it upon children.
Funny story: I was in special ed classes for my last year of high school. Half my teachers wanted me to be in the hyper-accelerated program, half my teachers wanted me to be in special ed; the latter teachers won. They took my resistance to doing homework and "disorganization" as a profound learning disability, despite never getting less than an A on a test.
A month or two before I dropped out, a story about one of my projects was featured in Forbes and other major publications. The same teachers and administrators who had forced me into that hellish existence were parading it around as this huge badge of honor for my little school; last I heard, it's still hanging up in the office somewhere. I never got an apology, never had anyone say "hey, we fucked up." They justified all of this in their minds; I'll never understand how.
I was in both the 'gifted' and the 'special ed' programs at the same time. the 'special' classes weren't so bad, really, if you only had to do it for two hours, twice a week, and it seems they were mostly worried about my handwriting.
It's funny, 'organizational skills' haunt me to this day, that's the other thing they tried to teach me. (and yeah, even now I'm pretty bad; I dono if I would call it a disability, but it's a big problem that holds me back.) but handwriting? the idea of actually spending time learning handwriting strikes me as very silly.
It works like this, in the mind of a (bad) educator:
1. I had to do this.
2. I don't do random shit, so it must be important.
3. Therefore, you have to do this.
This chain of logic breaks down at step 2, so that's where post-hoc rationalizations step in to save the day. That's why I'm going to say this explicitly: For everything you can come up with to justify handwriting classes, there's a better way to learn the same skill that also fosters things that are more important than having neat handwriting.
For example, fine motor control is better learned through PE classes that actually teach sports, which has the added benefit of promoting physical fitness. The aesthetics of handwriting is better learned through calligraphy as part of a good art class, which has the added benefit of transmitting a culture which is left out of handwriting classes.
I mean, it's crazy. If a child is special in any way, they'll probably get treated in a special way, except if they're highly intelligent. Say, in any kind of sports, if someone recognizes you're talented they'll give you special training and everything, so you can actually improve without being held back by others. But in school, if you're exceptionally intelligent, you still need to do the same stuff as everyone else even if it doesn't benefit you.
But I thought the publishers name sounded familiar and went googling and found http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32426/...
Which contains this gem:
"""Bolstering this trend is the so-called “gold open-access” model, in which publishing is supported not by subscription fees but by author fees. An example of a gold open-access journal is The Scientific World Journal, currently published by Cairo-based Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This megajournal covers virtually all scientific fields and imposes an article processing charge of $1,000 for each accepted article. Similarly, the better-known Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals charge authors anywhere from $1,350 to $2,900 to publish, with a discount if the researcher is affiliated with a university that is an institutional member."""
So effectively, if you are giving this article your attention, you are supporting a sketchy vanity press that does not appear to engage in the same level of peer review as more traditional journals, open-access or not.
So what was your thought process in submitting that article?
I don't think the evidence has completely verified this hypothesis, but I think there's some truth to it. I think it may be a contributing factor to the Dunning-Krueger effect in that depressed people are willing to accept things that others won't while having little self-confidence
/s
just trying to help
It's getting out of depression that's difficult. Otherwise people would go to the doctor to complain that they're not getting depressed enough, wouldn't they? There is such thing as not being sad enough. It's very rare that someone has unipolar mania, but it's common in bipolar disorder to fluctuate between the two extremes.
"In conclusion, the depression observed in children with high potential would seem to be characterized by narcissistic vulnerability associated with genuine traumatophilia,"
and the old-fashioned terminology like "narcissistic" and the use of outmoded (and never validated) projective tests of personality (like the Rorschach) shows the article is far out of the mainstream of current psychology. I was wondering how such an old-fashioned article could come from 2012, so I focused my attention on the academic affiliations of the authors (not from major centers for the study of high IQ or of depression) and the journal of publication (not a top journal in this field).
There is a huge prior literature on associations between high IQ and mood disorders, with much of that literature summarized in the authoritative textbook by Goodwin and Jamison.
http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec...
As a parent of four high-IQ children myself, painfully aware of how toxic the United States school system can be for such children,
http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html
I first of all sought local friendship networks of other parents who understand such children. We have been homeschoolers throughout our children's childhoods, and that seems to have provided our children with some extra scope for creativity and added resilience for facing personal challenges (including two international moves during the childhoods of our three oldest children). Through association with the Davidson Institute for Talent Development Young Scholars program,
http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/
we have learned about--and have shared--resources with other parents about building optimism in children. I especially like Martin E. P. Seligman's book The Optimistic Child
http://www.amazon.com/Optimistic-Child-Safeguard-Depression-...
as a framework for children to learn how to reality-check their own thinking and not to be depressed by setbacks in life.
I gather so. There are a few parts of the United States where psychoanalysis is still in vogue, but fewer and fewer year by year, as patients usually like to become well through the treatments they seek. I just did some Web searching about the approach you kindly mentioned. Is there replicable evidence that the Lacanian psychoanalysis is working for a large number of French patients?
Which approach works better? Quantitatively, not qualitatively.
"Aristotle introduced a quantitative factor, asserting that levels of melancholy and black bile are positively correlated; however, under a given threshold of black bile, it can give rise to an exceptional being"
The fact that Aristotle thought "black bile" was responsible for both is neither here not there, but just a necessary context to understand the quotation.
The study of 100 children is very briefly described and lacks controls. I wouldn't draw much in the way of conclusions from it.
This reminds me of the Jewish tradition, where men is punished when he eats from the Tree of Knowledge. The more you know, more easily you find anguish.
"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes deals with this subject in a splendid way (won the Nebula Award for best novel in 1966).
The tao says: therefore the sage, in exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills and strength their bones. Which is simple advice: don't think too much. Don't take everything so seriously.
It took me a life to learn that intelligence is not wisdom. The world is full of uneducated wises and intelligent fools.
Are you really smart? Pray for wisdom, not intelligence.
Sorry, just looking for real data.
I really wonder what is the average QI (for what it counts) here on HN...
The bad news: beyond about a 125 IQ, it's the CCCP (courage, creativity, curiosity, passion) that actually matter as predictors of creative achievement, and those correlate slightly positively with biological mental illness[0], and very strongly with induced mental illness due to social adversity.
Society makes sure that the best people have fucked-up lives. That's well-documented. Fucked-up lives lead to mental illness. Also well-documented.
The child's treatment during formative years 0-7 will have an immense impact on whether certain predispositions (I.E. psychopathic tendencies) are expressed later in life.
Dr. James Fallon, who was part of a documentary I saw a while back, was describing how he was shocked to discover that he had the brain of a psychopath, but his life turned out very differently because (and I'm paraphrasing) "when I look back at picture albums of my childhood, I'm always seeing smiles".
Interesting. Identical twins raised separately have a correlation of .76, while fraternal twins raised together have a correlation of just .55 and non-twin siblings raised together have a correlation of .47[0]. To me that suggests a strong genetic (though not necessarily heritable) component. And perhaps the .08 difference between fraternal twins and non-twin siblings is explained by differences in the mother's nutrition.
How do you measure the effect of nutrition? What studies are you looking at?
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlations...
This is not a stigmatizing statement at all. tone = {sarcasm: "implied"};
Perhaps people who would feel the urge to be reclusive would be more social if people like you kept your mouths shut every once in a while and didn't say pathetically pretentious things like "us normal, social people".
Who says this?
Two strawmen battle it out to see who will become the One. True. Scotsman.
Your point seems to be that some people aren't subject to mental illnes, and that some of those people are smart, courageous, etc. Sure, and vice versa.
It's not a zero-sum game where you decide you have 12% of this quality and 73% of this one one, so that means you should be compensating for (or naturally adept at) depression by focussing 38% of your energy and intelligence on...social things or whatever.
Secondly, there is no choice in faring better in solitary confinement, whether imposed or elective, nor in social situations because people simply do what they do and follow their emotions and reasoning, for the most part. Would you say Grigori Perelman is mentally ill?
Thanks, this is going in my "keepers" file ;)