I believe it. The smartest, most creative people I know also tend to suffer from crushing emotional problems -- depression, anxiety, loneliness.
In a similar line of thinking, there's a book called "A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness" that was a fascinating read. The gist of the book is that our best leaders' mental illnesses had something to do with them being great. Abraham Lincoln for example, suffered from depression. This fact may have given him special insight into the suffering of others -- a kind of empathy. This empathy was invaluable, says the author, to the decisions he made.
Anyway, yeah. I like this idea. Maybe suffering from mental illness isn't ALL bad. Maybe it has some valuable upsides.
I suffer from depressive episodes and perform better on the verbal sections of any aptitude test.
There is a grain of truth to this but I think this article implies causation when it's merely a correlation.
My own view is that some people are acutely sensitive to everything that happens around them. Even minor things like unexpected rain on the way to work can turn into an epiphany or a minor tragedy depending on your mood. You're constantly ruminating and over analyzing everything and so its possible that you're good at translating feelings into words.
"There is a grain of truth to this but I think this article implies causation when it's merely a correlation."
Even a correlation is very interesting!
In fact I tend to disagree, I don't think anyone is proposing that the causation must be direct, because there are still intelligent people who are not bipolar or depressive and there are bipolar and depressed people who are not intelligent. But the correlation, which I think everybody assuming is some third factor behind the mental illness and intelligence/creativity, is still interesting.
... of course, it's an interesting correlation in a sea of interesting correlations, and it's hard to tell which of them are genuinely interesting and which are just "throw enough variables together and you'll get all sorts of spurious correlations". But I'd submit that this is an unusally strong signal, as evidenced by the fact that humans have been making this observation for centuries now. Even if it is spurious, I suspect the proof of that would itself have something interesting in it.
I could write so much on this topic, but generally avoid doing so, as in written form it comes across as bragging.
Therefore I'll keep it short.
I'm cyclothymic (like mild bipolar), anxious far more often than not, and creating is the only thing which does anything for me, and even then, it doesn't do much.
I have the fortune of knowing a fair bit about my neurochemistry, having sequenced my genome and spent more time than is healthy in SNPedia, and my dopamine and serotonin systems are all kinds of screwed - low output, low uptake. My oxycontin system is amped up to the point that I should be schizophrenic. Perhaps I am.
Either way, the upshot is that I'm always empty. Always worthless. Always feeling like I haven't achieved a damned thing - and this drives me to be better, to create, to make, be that code, music, art, making random crap out of junk, or reading something, learning, aiming to have more knowledge that I can do things with.
Finally, from an objective standpoint, I have an IQ that caused my school to make me re-sit the IQ test with two people watching me, and still believe I had somehow cheated, and am diagnosed with cyclothymia. I choose to be unmedicated, as I'd far rather be sad and mad and have a drive to create and do, than be a happy docile blob.
While the idea of being a happy docile blob isn't something that most 'intelligent' people want, it is possible to be a happy intelligent person as well
Maybe suffering from mental illness isn't ALL bad. Maybe it has some valuable upsides.
Careful with statements like that. I've pondered quite a bit about this. Of course I too would like to think that such suffering isn't entirely pointless. But mental illness can be so incredibly devastating, no amount of gained wisdom will compensate for that. Especially if self-harm or suicide is involved, it's even harder to see any potential upsides.
As someone that suffers from mental illness (depression), it's not completely off to mark to say that it isn't all bad--I seem to do better than peers in many creative endeavors--but I would immediately give up the benefit it gives for the freedom of a more stable mind. I wouldn't have a second thought.
I read Ulysses S. Grant was depressed and frequently drank a lot of alcohol when he was not on active duty. He was brilliant in the field, but quickly fell apart without cannons firing all around. Pretty interesting...
Summary: it's well known that high IQs are linked to maladjustment in later life.
I sort of question if this 'bipolar' diagnosis is really a true bipolar disorder, or just an observed similarity between bipolar traits and high IQ thinking patterns.
Acute awareness and overdeveloped imagination can lead to exceptionally strong emotions about things that wouldn't even register to "normal" people (highly gifted children are often noted for some strange things like hypersensitivity to touch and color as well as both the intensity _and passing speed_ of their emotions). Simultaneously hyper-rationalization can cause those emotions to be checked rather forcefully even to the extend of flat affect (ala "Ender"). I wonder if the exterior effect could be seen as irrational mood swings, especially from a multi-choice survey...
It is a little frustrating that the sample is an extremely limited 22-23 years of age... I imagine that this age group is far more prone to _self-report_ behaviors that could be interpreted as bipolar behavior as it's a relatively unstable period of life to begin with, especially for gifted students who will selectively be entering high pressure job markets as opposed to their less competitive peers who will be settling into long-term careers.
Also, 10 IQ points is less than one standard deviation from the norm (a SD of IQ being defined as 15 points), so perhaps "above average intelligence" is a bit more accurate than "high intelligence" (I think 2 standard deviations is when you start talking about "gifted"ness). It would be interesting to see the wings of the distribution, although a sample of just 2000 would likely not spread much light there.
Given the number of genes involved in intelligence I would be more surprised if they didn’t share an underlying genetic basis.
On this topic the face is a really good example of this. There are very few genetic causes of intellectual disability that don’t affect the face as well. There has been some speculation that our obsession with facial beauty is tied to this as a way of identifying mutations that otherwise would be hard to detect in potential mates.
Anecdotally, many people I know who also have bipolar disorder (I have bipolar II) are also successful and by most measures very intelligent. It would be interesting to see a comparison of rates of bipolar individuals by industry - of course this is hampered by the fact most people aren't open about being bipolar because of the stigma around it :).
The people who get the biggest advantage are those that are just manic the whole time. Just like there are some people who are only depressed, there are some people who are only manic. Of course these people don't complain about mental illness so they are not so well studied.
The problem with being manic for months on end is that the initial exuberance and excitement has a way of turning into paranoia and anxiety. I'm not exactly sure how it happens, but it does.
It's weird like that. It's like at first the thoughts move wonderfully, like you're in the flow you get programming, but all the time. Then they move faster, and faster, and faster, and suddenly your brain is more chaos than anything.
Mania is not something you want to experience daily, or on a routine basis. It is not fun. It is _powerful_. It is being absolutely certain of everything you are, everything you think, everything you know. It is knowing that everything you do is right, and everyone else is wrong. It's having a sex drive turned to a thousand. It's feeling paranoid eventually.
Yes, there is increased productivity, but the cost is a lot higher than you expect. The messed up thing is you crave it when you lose it - because the certainty is really super addictive.
What I think you're actually referring to is not mania or hypomania - it's called hyperthymia.
It's similar in some ways to hypomania, but different in others.
For one last point of reference, here's a hypomanic episode for me:
Everything in the world is great.
Everything in the world is really great.
Productivity for a day or two
Holy shit, I'm so smart, everyone else is less smart than me!
Productivity that is more random
Oh my god, I can't believe how smart I am and how pathetic the rest of these people are.
Productivity is super random, starting to be unproductive
The most logical conclusion is that I'm probably god, like, I really do believe that, that seems very logical right now.
Productivity goes away.
How does it feel like? Since my depressive episodes (approx. every 7 to 10 weeks) are usually short and don't affect my outside live much, i never felt the need to seek medical help. Is it still worth checking?
The rule of thumb is if you have any condition that you have experienced multiple times without the need for medical help then you don’t need medical help.
I have an appendix that flares up every few years and I leave it alone. I have a pain threshold that I have set that if I exceed I will go to the hospital, but if it stays below this level then I just watch and wait. I have no desire to be cut open unless I need to be. So far this has worked out well :)
You may have a less severe variant of bipolar disorder - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclothymia. If it doesn't impact your life though, it isn't a pathology, it's probably fine. If it starts to seriously impact your life, then you should look into it I'd say.
The most important thing is keeping you healthy and okay. If you're healthy and okay, then that's wonderful.
One thing I will note, over time, monitor if it gets worse, and be vigilant as hell - it can develop depending on your age and over time, so just watch out. I'd even go so far as to ask someone, preferably someone in your family you don't see more than once or twice a year, to say if they notice a behavioral change in you, just as a backstop in case.
For reference, what finally got me to get help was very serious thoughts of suicide and a hypomanic episode where I quite literally thought I was god.
> Given the number of genes involved in intelligence I would be more surprised if they didn’t share an underlying genetic basis.
That doesn't follow. Simply because the genes sets overlap doesn't mean they have to correlate. If there are 10k genes affecting schizophrenia and 10k intelligence (plausible scales from the GWASes), then since there aren't that many varying genes there is likely overlap, but there's no reason to expect simply from this overlap that they will covary; the genes conferring benefits for one could confer problems for the other. In fact, the overlap could be total without creating correlation; and it would be just as plausible to argue for anti-correlation/inverse-correlation - the same gene could protect against schizophrenia and reductions in intelligence by making neurons more robust or defending against infections. There should be some deeper reason for any correlation of IQ/schizophrenia than simply 'they both are affected by a lot of genes'. (Well, an awful lot of traits are affected by a lot of genes, you know... Polygenicity is expected to be the norm for most of the heritable stuff.)
Worse, there are GWASes for both schizophrenia and IQ; the former has made a lot more progress than the latter, but nevertheless, I am not aware that any particular overlap in hits has been noticed.
I bet many bipolar readers in their manic phase are all "Yey, I'm intelligent and creative" while the depressive ones feel even worse (to say the least) when they read titles like these.
In my own experience it's the opposite. Depression and creativity go together. If I'm manic I'm too busy having experiences and not really into creating things.
Bipolar usually means you oscillate between a manic phase (elevated mood, energy, impulsivity, "irrational exuberance") and a depressive phase (no description needed i guess). What I wanted to suggest is that if you are in the manic phase, you see good things even in the disorder that ruins your life and if you are in the other phase, you already feel doomed anyways.
Hmm, that seems to describe my life in a lot of ways. After my ex left me, it really spiraled me, but I've definitely always been told how intelligent I am by peers, their parents, and my educators (I'll admit it's probably true although I've steadfastly denied the allegation myself as someone who's seen the entirety of my work here on planet earth).
And now I sort of bounce around. I've lately ended up more on the manic phase side of things but it's a quick flip of the switch towards a more depressed feeling. I'm learning to mellow out towards the center with lots of exercise, positive healthy habits, and plenty of dates from tinder. Rationally I figure visiting a therapist might not be the worst thing in the world, but then I have no idea what I'd talk about. I'm a white, male, software engineer living in a world class city, making a pretty penny. I'm tall, good looking, and funny. I'm working on a sitcom, standup, and have a great job. Rationally I also see that my life is indeed awesome so it's hard to justify going to a therapist. Also, if they caught me in a "manic" phase I'd probably just be gushing about how great things are, and I can annoy my friends with that sort of shit.
I've never been clinically diagnosed with anything so it's more of a self diagnosis and who knows how many grains of truth there are to it, but it feels relatively accurate.
That being said, if I continue on this upswing I've been putting myself into lately, I should be good to go! So cheers to that! I can weather the mildly bad times, I've weathered a lot of awful times, and I guess in the end, you only learn to understand yourself a bit better every time. And as long as you force yourself to get out of bed and do literally just about anything (easier said than done sometimes) it almost always gets better.
Sounds reasonable. It seems to me that inteligence and creativity are about diversity of experience. Unstable behaviour probably means more diverse experience so it boosts creativity and inteligence. Except that those people can't easly live normal life, they must look for way to adapt - great training for inteligence.
But why to link it with genetics? It might be environmental, matter of upbringing or anything else, isn't it?
So what does this mean for those who received treatment? Does that mean they are less intelligent? Also, hypo mania can give these traits, but bat shit crazy mania is the main reason for hospitalization and negates any benifit,
Racing thoughts doesn't always mean the thoughts are useful. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's often used to describe manic, "crazy" thinking. Thoughts are racing, but they aren't always logical steps from one to the next. Or even coherent. Like, I dunno, a train of thought that's ever-so-brilliant on how you'll break someone out of prison.
While I love mania and the amazingness of feeling like a god, it's not always (or often) that it's productive. Hypomania + stimulants seems a much better combo (esp as drugs can help kick off or stay sightly manic, though if taken sporadically, mania seems to result more often.)
Heh, I was comparing that to a "create stuff, do and learn new things, screw normal life, I'd never fit in" mentality, which surprisingly a lot of people don't have. I wouldn't call all of them stupid, though. Stagnated, maybe?
In a similar line of thinking, there's a book called "A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness" that was a fascinating read. The gist of the book is that our best leaders' mental illnesses had something to do with them being great. Abraham Lincoln for example, suffered from depression. This fact may have given him special insight into the suffering of others -- a kind of empathy. This empathy was invaluable, says the author, to the decisions he made.
Anyway, yeah. I like this idea. Maybe suffering from mental illness isn't ALL bad. Maybe it has some valuable upsides.