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I found an article about Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals. It talks about this a bit. Part of what I took from the article is that gifted individu

by zoba 17y ago

I found an article about Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals. It talks about this a bit. Part of what I took from the article is that gifted individuals have the capacity to appreciate things more than non gifted people. Therefore, when a depressing thing is being understood by a gifted person, it hits the person much harder than a non gifted because they can really understand all of what it means. http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Webb_ExistentialDepressionInGiftedIndividuals.shtml http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Webb_Existentia...

tokenadult 17y ago
I've had a lot of discussions with parents of gifted children about this, as I am now the state president of an association dealing with gifted education. And I have attended a conference of the national organization that hosts the link you kindly shared. I have two comments: a) There is some indication in some studies that high IQ is correlated with (that is, is a "risk factor" for) depressive illness. It is not at all clear what the causal mechanism may be, as correlation is not necessarily a sign of causation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus... There is still ongoing research in various world cultures to confirm and explicate this finding of some studies. b) Some parents who talk about "existential depression" are just engaging in euphemism. Their children have regular, everyday depression, just like some kids who are not gifted. There is no carefully controlled study at all http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html suggesting much uniqueness in the expression of depressed mood in high-IQ persons as contrasted with average-IQ persons. Everyone who feels depressed deserves and needs compassion. (A fairly robust study finding is that persons who experience depression tend to experience less compassion from persons near to them than do persons who do not experience depression.) And gifted learners most definitely need educational provisions different from typical school programs. High-IQ adults may or may not feel they have a supportive social circle, depending crucially on their paths to higher education and the careers they pursue. Gifted people in general have special needs, and depressed people in general have special needs, and there may be a special intersection of needs in gifted people who are depressed, but it is not clear yet what role, if any, giftedness has in mood disorders.

by zoba 17y ago

tokenadult 17y ago

I've had a lot of discussions with parents of gifted children about this, as I am now the state president of an association dealing with gifted education. And I have attended a conference of the national organization that hosts the link you kindly shared. I have two comments: a) There is some indication in some studies that high IQ is correlated with (that is, is a "risk factor" for) depressive illness. It is not at all clear what the causal mechanism may be, as correlation is not necessarily a sign of causation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus... There is still ongoing research in various world cultures to confirm and explicate this finding of some studies. b) Some parents who talk about "existential depression" are just engaging in euphemism. Their children have regular, everyday depression, just like some kids who are not gifted. There is no carefully controlled study at all http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html suggesting much uniqueness in the expression of depressed mood in high-IQ persons as contrasted with average-IQ persons. Everyone who feels depressed deserves and needs compassion. (A fairly robust study finding is that persons who experience depression tend to experience less compassion from persons near to them than do persons who do not experience depression.) And gifted learners most definitely need educational provisions different from typical school programs. High-IQ adults may or may not feel they have a supportive social circle, depending crucially on their paths to higher education and the careers they pursue. Gifted people in general have special needs, and depressed people in general have special needs, and there may be a special intersection of needs in gifted people who are depressed, but it is not clear yet what role, if any, giftedness has in mood disorders.