Smart People And Their Interesting Connection To Depression
Smart people are not always the ones who make the best choices. A high IQ is not a guarantee of success or a guarantee of happiness. In many cases, the wiser of others carry an excessive burden of concern, suffer the anxiety of existence, and feel great despair, which usually consumes even the last traces of optimism.
It is common for these geniuses of art, math, and science to be seen as silent beings, special types who are well attached to their own strangeness. A few examples of them are Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, or Amadeus Mozart himself… great, creative, and exceptional minds that drifted into a dead end of their anxiety, where only a tragic end awaited.
But how real is all this? Is there a direct link to high IQ and depression? It is good to clarify that intelligence is not necessarily involved in the development of mental disorders.
However, there is a risk and a tendency to be overly concerned, self-critical, and to experience reality in a distorted and often negative way. These are all factors that in many cases shape depression and give it shape. It is good to point out that, of course, there are exceptions. In society, we have ingenious individuals who know how to exploit their full potential, investing not only in the quality of their own lives, but also in society itself.
However, many works, analyzes, and books demonstrate the existence of this rare tendency, especially for those with an IQ of more than 170 points.
Very intelligent people and their nature
“The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius” is a work that makes it easy to understand how the minds and brain functions of intelligent and creative people are constructed.
Studies of highly intelligent individuals
Lewis Terman, who was
Intelligence: a heavy burden
“Termites,” i.e., children who participated in Lewis Terman’s research and are now adults, may confirm that higher intelligence is associated with dissatisfaction in life. Although many of them became famous and achieved good status in society, a good proportion of them also attempted suicide more than once, or became addicted to alcohol or other drugs.
Another interesting aspect that was explored by this research group and that can be seen in individuals with high intellectual abilities was their high sensitivity to world problems. Not only are they concerned about worthlessness, world hunger, and wars, but they feel shrinking in the face of selfish, irrational, and illogical behavior.
Emotional ballast and blind score in smart people
Experts say that very intelligent people occasionally suffer from a mental disorder in which they seem to break away from their own minds. In other words, they see their lives from above like a third-person speaking narrator, to experience their reality accurately and objectively without being fully involved in it.
This approach to life causes them to often have “blind spots,” a concept that has a lot to do with emotional intelligence, and which Daniel Goleman discusses in his interesting book of the same name. The sufferer of this mental disorder deceives himself by gaining a distorted perception of reality at a time when we are making choices about what to focus on and what to avoid in order to avoid responsibility.
We can also easily conclude that intelligent people often suffer from serious deficiencies on an emotional level. This indicates that it would be good to add a new factor to the long-overestimated IQ metric when performing a psychometric test.
We talk about “wisdom,” that important skill of developing satisfaction in daily life, the ability to form a good self-awareness, and a good self-confidence. We are also talking about the ideal skills we need to work with other people to build genuine, simple and concrete happiness.
