"Mental" Illness: The Future of Treatment

scientificamerican.com/arti … telligent/

Bad News for the Highly Intelligent
Superior IQs are associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests

There are advantages to being smart. People who do well on standardized tests of intelligence—IQ tests—tend to be more successful in the classroom and the workplace. Although the reasons are not fully understood, they also tend to live longer, healthier lives, and are less likely to experience negative life events such as bankruptcy.
Now there’s some bad news for people in the right tail of the IQ bell curve. In a study just published in the journal Intelligence, Pitzer College researcher Ruth Karpinski and her colleagues emailed a survey with questions about psychological and physiological disorders to members of Mensa. A “high IQ society,” Mensa requires that its members have an IQ in the top 2 percent. For most intelligence tests, this corresponds to an IQ of about 132 or higher. (The average IQ of the general population is 100.) The survey of Mensa’s highly intelligent members found that they were more likely to suffer from a range of serious disorders.
The survey covered mood disorders (depression, dysthymia and bipolar), anxiety disorders (generalized, social and obsessive-compulsive), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism. It also covered environmental allergies, asthma and autoimmune disorders. Respondents were asked to report whether they had ever been formally diagnosed with each disorder or suspected they suffered from it. With a return rate of nearly 75 percent, Karpinski and her colleagues compared the percentage of the 3,715 respondents who reported each disorder to the national average.

The biggest differences between the Mensa group and the general population were seen for mood disorders and anxiety disorders. More than a quarter (26.7 percent) of the sample reported that they had been formally diagnosed with a mood disorder, while 20 percent reported an anxiety disorder—far higher than the national averages of around 10 percent for each. The differences were smaller, but still statistically significant and practically meaningful, for most of the other disorders. The prevalence of environmental allergies was triple the national average (33 percent vs. 11 percent).
To explain their findings, Karpinski and her colleagues propose the hyper brain/hyper body theory. This theory holds that, for all of its advantages, being highly intelligent is associated with psychological and physiological “overexcitabilities,” or OEs. A concept introduced by the Polish psychiatrist and psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski in the 1960s, an OE is an unusually intense reaction to an environmental threat or insult. This can include anything from a startling sound to confrontation with another person.
Psychological OEs include a heighted tendency to ruminate and worry, whereas physiological OEs arise from the body’s response to stress. According to the hyper brain/hyper body theory, these two types of OEs are more common in highly intelligent people and interact with each other in a “vicious cycle” to cause both psychological and physiological dysfunction. For example, a highly intelligent person may overanalyze a disapproving comment made by a boss, imagining negative outcomes that simply wouldn’t occur to someone less intelligent. That may trigger the body’s stress response, which may make the person even more anxious.
The results of this study must be interpreted cautiously because they are correlational. Showing that a disorder is more common in a sample of people with high IQs than in the general population doesn’t prove that high intelligence is the cause of the disorder. It’s also possible that people who join Mensa differ from other people in ways other than just IQ. For example, people preoccupied with intellectual pursuits may spend less time than the average person on physical exercise and social interaction, both of which have been shown to have broad benefits for psychological and physical health.
All the same, Karpinski and her colleagues’ findings set the stage for research that promises to shed new light on the link between intelligence and health. One possibility is that associations between intelligence and health outcomes reflect pleiotropy, which occurs when a gene influences seemingly unrelated traits. There is already some evidence to suggest that this is the case. In a 2015 study, Rosalind Arden and her colleagues concluded that the association between IQ and longevity is mostly explained by genetic factors.

From a practical standpoint, this research may ultimately lead to insights about how to improve people’s psychological and physical well-being. If overexcitabilities turn out to be the mechanism underlying the IQ-health relationship, then interventions aimed at curbing these sometimes maladaptive responses may help people lead happier, healthier lives.

A lot of ways for pain was invented by smart people.
I feel maybe smartness is a disease.

My friend is an anti-natalist which means that she doesn’t believe human baby’s should be born so thoughtlessly or maybe not at all, she says. 8ut only because what we get out of life doesn’t measure up to what it does to us.

5he also tried to ride a Zebra but he didn’t like that.

Zebras are mean.

:laughing:

I don’t blame it…

Too many births, not enough love.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXlJ3lgpiGQ[/youtube]

The only love out there is what you give.
But how do you learn when you never received.

…observe.

…learn from others who exhibit the art of emitting love.

…think of the things you do love, and apply it to living things.

But how is a kid supposed to know to do that?

Its a thing hard to teach, but a good teacher will manage.
I did have one of those early on. But these are rare, brave people.

The relation between depression and intelligence, I believe, comes because the person doesn’t accept that the things that bother him or her are important.

The day I decided to admit they were important was the day I became free. But still I was depressed because I was so alienated from these problems from pretending for so long that they weren’t important. I had to acquaint myself with them, do in little time what my body expected me to be doing the whole time. And then one day before I knew it I was happy.

Takes time and hard work.

Also I had to work on my other disease, drug addiction, which feeds so well from depression. That’s just a matter of drugs affect me more deeply than none addicts, tangling that power up with avoiding pain finally triggered the addiction, where drugs are more fundamental to me than happiness or anything. So I can’t use them anymore, and the way to quit them is a trip. I guess healing from both diseases came hand in hand. Leaving depression gave me the reason and quitting drugs the means.

Along the way a lot of magic and beauty which effects are still unfolding. It was all worth it. Goddamn I’m a lucky man.

Anyway, I gave my prescription for depression, but for drug addiction it’s more.complicated, to do with more basic neural pathways, so you really need professionals. I say go with tecovered or recovering addicts that channel or become professionals, so AA and rehabs that use the Minnesota method.

I can say it’s worth it. I even feel lucky for the pain I felt.

As I was being driven off to the airport bound for my rehab in Venezuela, Fixed Cross called. I told him “it begins.” Maybe he didn’t know what I meant, even though I had talked about it. I meant the project of health.

Perhaps because of this, and so we teach ourselves by tapping into what’s inherently/innately within… I guess that is why I have felt that I am not here to teach, but to experience experiences.

Is it real if someone has to be taught the non-conceptualised?

My mother, a fan of dog training, says she has become convinced that dogs do not require training, dog owners do.

In the same way, I don’t think children should be taught. It is rather adults.

My depression begins here:

and ends here, as mine was due to an overwhelming neurological-flooring illness, which I now have under control by exercising 3: Cries for help :stuck_out_tongue:

But yes… you are right, in that once the situation is accepted, then recovery and/or healing become options, but oh what a hurdle to have to pass. :neutral_face:

…and do you feel health(ier)?

Why are Venezuelans so beautiful/attractive? Is your mother beautiful and your father attractive?

Do not infant innate qualities still need guiding? the terrible twos are testament to that. :laughing:

I sincerely believe all a child needs from adults is love and freedom. But adults have to be trained to give that.

I believe excercice is key. I like long walks uphill myself. Uphill if possible.

I do feel a whole lot healthier. Health maybe just meaning I am happy with what I got.

Lol I don’t know.

Coming out of hippie-central and having been close to a family where the children supposedly were free to teach the parents, I report that one of them is dead, the next is a the quintessence of dishonourableness, and the third has transgendered.

You now what the problem is? Parents may claim they want the child to take control but as soon as it makes a slight move out of their comfort zone, they traumatize it with their horrified turning away. Because you see, far worse for a kid than it being forbidden stuff by harsh parents, is to be made to understand viscerally and without ever any explanation that its natural tendencies are abject.

Nay, I say the parents cant voluntarily set themselves up to be taught.

The best they can do is teach the child what they know to be valuable, and prepare for when the day comes that the child will enforce its teachings on them. If it happens they can be proud for being deemed personally, not just biologically, worthy of their offspring.

It is likely that the only thing a child can truly come to know is that which it was never told.

Lol I didn’t say anything about voluntarily.

Parents can’t avoid being force-taught though.

What, if anything, would you change from how it goes in the West now?