Relationships between Depression and High Intellectual Potential (2012)

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/drt/2012/567376/

by dakimov • 13 years ago

109 54 13 years ago

emmelaich• 13 years ago

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

jimrandomh• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

eksith2• 13 years 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

SatvikBeri• 13 years 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...

alexvr2• 13 years 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).

qzxt• 13 years ago

>> "It's one thing to be a recluse who scorns 'normal, social people'"

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".

rhizome3• 13 years ago

In the voice of the late Don LaFontaine:

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?

yogo• 13 years ago

This is one of my favorite comments. As I've always said, "Society: what a dumb concept."

dusklight• 13 years ago

Citation please?

dschiptsov• 13 years ago

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

X4• 13 years 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_baker2• 13 years 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

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

psbp2• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

You're not very good at that, are you?

just trying to help

zokier2• 13 years 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.

jacques_chester• 13 years ago

Perhaps you mean pessimism. As others have pointed out, one of the features of clinical depression is that has usurped higher cognitive function -- ie, you can't choose to "snap out of it". It snaps your choices instead.

aaronh• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

hughlomas• 13 years ago

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

droithomme• 13 years ago

Miraca Gross did a long term study of exceptionally gifted students in Australia.

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• 13 years 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.

lsc• 13 years ago

>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.

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.

codemonkeymike• 13 years ago

This seems more common then I thought, because the same thing happened to me in high school. Most teachers thought I was an idiot because I never completed a single homework assignment despite getting high marks on their exams. They held me back in mathematics and wouldn't allow me to enter any honors or AP classes. After many long arguments with the guidance counselor I was able to enter AP Chemistry and AP Computer Science which I passed both with A's. It seemed the only teachers who though I wasn't and idiot at that school were those two AP teachers, go figure.

Livven• 13 years ago

You've hit the nail on the head with your comparison. That's exactly how I'd felt all these years in school. It's easy to see that putting an averagely intelligent person in a class for developmentally disabled children doesn't make sense, yet for many people it appears impossible that putting a highly intelligent person in a class for regular children might be anything less than optimal.

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.

olefoo2• 13 years 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/...

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.

rhizome3• 13 years ago

Relationships between Depression and High Intellectual Potential (2012)

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