7 ms·

Relationships between Depression and High Intellectual Potential (2012)

109 points by dakimov 13y ago

emmelaich 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melencolia_I http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melencolia_I
jimrandomh 13y ago
When a 21st-century paper's abstract starts off by talking about the medieval four humors theory of medicine, and it doesn't even acknowledge how wrong that is, you know you can safely stop reading.
- Osmium 13y ago
  In fairness, I think they were trying to point out that the idea there might be a correlation between intelligence and depression has been around for a long time: "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.
- chalst 13y ago
  That struck me as odd - more emphasis placed on old theories that were essentially justified by anecdote and ungrounded speculation than on their study. The study of 100 children is very briefly described and lacks controls. I wouldn't draw much in the way of conclusions from it.
michaelochurch 13y ago
The good news: there seems to be no well-documented correlation between upper-tier IQ and mental illness. At a measured IQ of 150, you're no more or less likely to have mental health issues than at 100. You can rest easy now (sort of). Technically speaking, your high IQ is not going to make you crazy or depressed. 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.
- eksith 13y ago
  Well that makes sense because IQ is dependent on a wide variety of factors in addition to genetics. The nutrition of the mother as well as exposure to certain chemicals during the pregnancy plus actions/drugs used during the birth can play as large if not greater part in the IQ of a child as genetics. 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". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fallon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fallon
  - SatvikBeri 13y ago
    The nutrition of the mother as well as exposure to certain chemicals during the pregnancy plus actions/drugs used during the birth can play as large if not greater part in the IQ of a child as genetics. 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_between_IQ_and_degree_of_genetic_relatedness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlations...
    - eksith 13y ago
      Here you go : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20937654 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20937654
- alexvr 13y ago
  Your second paragraph is freaking me out a bit. I don't want to believe it, but it makes sense, and history seems to support it. My theory, though, is that the smart, courageous, creative, curious, passionate people with a strong "EQ" aren't as subject to mental illness. It's one thing to be a recluse who scorns "normal, social people" and stays in his cave doing pretentious, so-so, slightly-creative intellectual work just to spite others, perpetually repeating to himself, "I am smarter than those people," and it's another thing to be a genuine, smart, creative, curious, passionate dude who can actually deal with being isolated from others when he needs to be, and who has the social skills and empathy to socialize when he wants to. I think it also matters whether you're a natural introvert or extrovert, because I theorize that introverts can better cope with the inherent solitude in a creative process. But to be relatively safe from mental illness, you've got to be one of those introverts who could, with some effort, fake it as an extrovert -- one with exceptionally acute social awareness. You need some serious emotional capacity and social understanding to distance yourself from depression if you're a bright, passionate, creative powerhouse, unless you're on the other side of the fence: a natural extrovert who possesses these qualities. In that case, you just have to fight the urge to socialize in order to get your creative work done (or perhaps you are creative while socializing).
dschiptsov 13y ago
How about statistical data that a clinical depression occurs mostly among women?)
- X4 13y ago
  Guess again. Most woman are emotionally more stable than men, when it comes to stress-resistance. Men are usually shielded much weaker to mentally stressing attacks. That's because men favor thinking logical, but trying to grasp illogical or stupid behavior causes a lot of stress. Could be connected with the amount of "Mirror-Neurons" of men.
j_baker 13y ago
One school of thought is that depressed people are in closer contact with reality due to their lack of defense mechanisms that keep others happy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism 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
- psbp 13y ago
  I don't have a high IQ, but I've found that if I wilfully depress myself before doing something mentally tasking I usually perform much better than I would have otherwise.
  - pcrh 13y ago
    You're not very good at that, are you? /s just trying to help
  - zokier 13y ago
    I feel that statements like that belittle actual depression, which best to my knowledge is not something that you can pop into or out from that trivially.
    - psbp 13y ago
      Maybe it's just mood alteration. It does take a lot of effort.
    - Gravityloss 13y ago
      The problem with words like depression is that they really do have many meanings.
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      I feel that statements like that are a working out of ideas out loud, with a community, and show a thoughtfulness and curiosity that deserves encouraging amongst humans. If you disagree with an idea, show evidence rather than trying to shame people into silence.
aaronh 13y ago
while there may in fact be such a correlation, after skimming this "paper" it appears to be mostly philosophical rambling and armchair musings, very little data, no graphs or charts or analyses showing correlation, etc., just citations of other papers.
caublestone 13y ago
It's kind of depressing that one needs a high level of intellect to understand the paper.
- hughlomas 13y ago
  No, this paper is a mimicry of an actual paper, it is analogous to fool's gold.
droithomme 13y ago
Miraca Gross did a long term study of exceptionally gifted students in Australia. http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10489.aspx 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.
- daeken 13y ago
  > That is what it is like for exceptionally gifted children who are mainstreamed. 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.
olefoo 13y ago
I was mildly appalled that such a low quality article made it onto the frontpage of HN, a psychological study that starts off by talking about Aristotle and les quatres humeurs scores high on my bullshit detection algorithm. But I thought the publishers name sounded familiar and went googling and found http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32426/title/Predatory-Publishing/ 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.
- rhizome 13y ago
  See also: "Pay To Play" in live music.
- dakimov 13y ago
  You see this article has a catchy title with no actual content, and it did quite well on the HN that is sort of exposing. Next time I'll read the article before submitting it, sorry.
  - olefoo 13y ago
    > Next time I'll read the article before submitting it, sorry. So what was your thought process in submitting that article?
- mbq 13y ago
  There are many problems with the golden model (like really golden prices if you compare them to their real costs), but it is not true that it implies bad quality -- greed does. Springer's BMC for instance is golden and quite reliable, while Elsevier lives from subscriptions and does even worse things than Hindawi.
tokenadult 13y ago
This article was a weird read for someone like me who meets regularly with psychologists from a scientifically oriented research department of psychology (at the University of Minnesota). The conclusion of the article begins, "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-Recurrent-Depression/dp/0195135792/ 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 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/ 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-Resilience/dp/0618918094/learninfreed 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.
- jdietrich 13y ago
  The French approach to psychiatry is very different to that in the Anglophone world. Lacanian psychoanalysis is still a mainstream treatment, even for developmental disorders like autism. The article is wholly mainstream by French standards.
logical42 13y ago
If high intellectual potential means an increased awareness of how fucked humanity actually is, then it isn't super surprising that high intellectual potential is positively correlated with depression.
ap22213 13y ago
honest serious question: do we have evidence that high IQ (beyond say 120 or so) is useful for anything important? Seems like a lot of people seek high IQ, but what's the advantage exactly?
- doctorstupid 13y ago
  It's only an advantage if you have such a high IQ. If you didn't, then you wouldn't be interested in the kind of problems that would require it.
  - ap22213 13y ago
    Like if maybe some people had such high IQs that they saw problems with people who thought their moderately high IQs were useful. Sorry, just looking for real data.
siscia 13y ago
We all believe to be super genius, don't we ? I really wonder what is the average QI (for what it counts) here on HN...
scardine 13y ago
Ignorance is bliss. 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.

109 points by dakimov 13y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melencolia_I http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melencolia_I

When a 21st-century paper's abstract starts off by talking about the medieval four humors theory of medicine, and it doesn't even acknowledge how wrong that is, you know you can safely stop reading.

Osmium 13y ago
In fairness, I think they were trying to point out that the idea there might be a correlation between intelligence and depression has been around for a long time: "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.
chalst 13y ago
That struck me as odd - more emphasis placed on old theories that were essentially justified by anecdote and ungrounded speculation than on their study. The study of 100 children is very briefly described and lacks controls. I wouldn't draw much in the way of conclusions from it.

michaelochurch 13y ago

The good news: there seems to be no well-documented correlation between upper-tier IQ and mental illness. At a measured IQ of 150, you're no more or less likely to have mental health issues than at 100. You can rest easy now (sort of). Technically speaking, your high IQ is not going to make you crazy or depressed. 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.

eksith 13y ago
Well that makes sense because IQ is dependent on a wide variety of factors in addition to genetics. The nutrition of the mother as well as exposure to certain chemicals during the pregnancy plus actions/drugs used during the birth can play as large if not greater part in the IQ of a child as genetics. 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". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fallon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Fallon
- SatvikBeri 13y ago
  The nutrition of the mother as well as exposure to certain chemicals during the pregnancy plus actions/drugs used during the birth can play as large if not greater part in the IQ of a child as genetics. 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_between_IQ_and_degree_of_genetic_relatedness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlations...
  - eksith 13y ago
    Here you go : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20937654 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20937654
alexvr 13y ago
Your second paragraph is freaking me out a bit. I don't want to believe it, but it makes sense, and history seems to support it. My theory, though, is that the smart, courageous, creative, curious, passionate people with a strong "EQ" aren't as subject to mental illness. It's one thing to be a recluse who scorns "normal, social people" and stays in his cave doing pretentious, so-so, slightly-creative intellectual work just to spite others, perpetually repeating to himself, "I am smarter than those people," and it's another thing to be a genuine, smart, creative, curious, passionate dude who can actually deal with being isolated from others when he needs to be, and who has the social skills and empathy to socialize when he wants to. I think it also matters whether you're a natural introvert or extrovert, because I theorize that introverts can better cope with the inherent solitude in a creative process. But to be relatively safe from mental illness, you've got to be one of those introverts who could, with some effort, fake it as an extrovert -- one with exceptionally acute social awareness. You need some serious emotional capacity and social understanding to distance yourself from depression if you're a bright, passionate, creative powerhouse, unless you're on the other side of the fence: a natural extrovert who possesses these qualities. In that case, you just have to fight the urge to socialize in order to get your creative work done (or perhaps you are creative while socializing).

dschiptsov 13y ago

How about statistical data that a clinical depression occurs mostly among women?)

X4 13y ago
Guess again. Most woman are emotionally more stable than men, when it comes to stress-resistance. Men are usually shielded much weaker to mentally stressing attacks. That's because men favor thinking logical, but trying to grasp illogical or stupid behavior causes a lot of stress. Could be connected with the amount of "Mirror-Neurons" of men.

j_baker 13y ago

One school of thought is that depressed people are in closer contact with reality due to their lack of defense mechanisms that keep others happy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism 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

psbp 13y ago
I don't have a high IQ, but I've found that if I wilfully depress myself before doing something mentally tasking I usually perform much better than I would have otherwise.
- pcrh 13y ago
  You're not very good at that, are you? /s just trying to help
- zokier 13y ago
  I feel that statements like that belittle actual depression, which best to my knowledge is not something that you can pop into or out from that trivially.
  - psbp 13y ago
    Maybe it's just mood alteration. It does take a lot of effort.
  - Gravityloss 13y ago
    The problem with words like depression is that they really do have many meanings.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    I feel that statements like that are a working out of ideas out loud, with a community, and show a thoughtfulness and curiosity that deserves encouraging amongst humans. If you disagree with an idea, show evidence rather than trying to shame people into silence.

aaronh 13y ago

while there may in fact be such a correlation, after skimming this "paper" it appears to be mostly philosophical rambling and armchair musings, very little data, no graphs or charts or analyses showing correlation, etc., just citations of other papers.

caublestone 13y ago

It's kind of depressing that one needs a high level of intellect to understand the paper.

hughlomas 13y ago
No, this paper is a mimicry of an actual paper, it is analogous to fool's gold.

droithomme 13y ago

Miraca Gross did a long term study of exceptionally gifted students in Australia. http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10489.aspx 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.

daeken 13y ago
> That is what it is like for exceptionally gifted children who are mainstreamed. 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.

olefoo 13y ago

I was mildly appalled that such a low quality article made it onto the frontpage of HN, a psychological study that starts off by talking about Aristotle and les quatres humeurs scores high on my bullshit detection algorithm. But I thought the publishers name sounded familiar and went googling and found http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32426/title/Predatory-Publishing/ 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.

rhizome 13y ago
See also: "Pay To Play" in live music.
dakimov 13y ago
You see this article has a catchy title with no actual content, and it did quite well on the HN that is sort of exposing. Next time I'll read the article before submitting it, sorry.
- olefoo 13y ago
  > Next time I'll read the article before submitting it, sorry. So what was your thought process in submitting that article?
mbq 13y ago
There are many problems with the golden model (like really golden prices if you compare them to their real costs), but it is not true that it implies bad quality -- greed does. Springer's BMC for instance is golden and quite reliable, while Elsevier lives from subscriptions and does even worse things than Hindawi.

tokenadult 13y ago

This article was a weird read for someone like me who meets regularly with psychologists from a scientifically oriented research department of psychology (at the University of Minnesota). The conclusion of the article begins, "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-Recurrent-Depression/dp/0195135792/ 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 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/ 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-Resilience/dp/0618918094/learninfreed 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.

jdietrich 13y ago
The French approach to psychiatry is very different to that in the Anglophone world. Lacanian psychoanalysis is still a mainstream treatment, even for developmental disorders like autism. The article is wholly mainstream by French standards.

logical42 13y ago

If high intellectual potential means an increased awareness of how fucked humanity actually is, then it isn't super surprising that high intellectual potential is positively correlated with depression.

ap22213 13y ago

honest serious question: do we have evidence that high IQ (beyond say 120 or so) is useful for anything important? Seems like a lot of people seek high IQ, but what's the advantage exactly?

doctorstupid 13y ago
It's only an advantage if you have such a high IQ. If you didn't, then you wouldn't be interested in the kind of problems that would require it.
- ap22213 13y ago
  Like if maybe some people had such high IQs that they saw problems with people who thought their moderately high IQs were useful. Sorry, just looking for real data.

siscia 13y ago

We all believe to be super genius, don't we ? I really wonder what is the average QI (for what it counts) here on HN...

scardine 13y ago

Ignorance is bliss. 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.