Can we talk about mental illness?

riparianx

For a site extremely focused on fixing bad thinking patterns, I've noticed a bizarre lack of discussion here. Considering the high correlation between intelligence and mental illness, you'd think it would be a bigger topic.

I personally suffer from Generalized Anxiety Disorder and a very tame panic disorder. Most of this is focused on financial and academic things, but I will also get panicky about social interaction, responsibilities, and things that happened in the past that seriously shouldn't bother me. I have an almost amusing response to anxiety that is basically my brain panicking and telling me to go hide under my desk.

I know lukeprog and Alicorn managed to fight off a good deal of their issues in this area and wrote up how, but I don't think enough has been done. They mostly dealt with depression. What about rational schizophrenics and phobics and bipolar people? It's difficult to find anxiety advice that goes beyond "do yoga while watching the sunrise!" Pop psych isn't very helpful. I think LessWrong could be. What's mental illness but a wrongness in the head?

Mental illness seems to be worse to intelligent people than your typical biases, honestly. Hiding under my desk is even less useful than, say, appealing to authority during an argument. At least the latter has the potential to be useful. I know it's limiting me, and starting cycles of avoidance, and so much more. And my mental illness isn't even that bad! Trying to be rational and successful when schizophrenic sounds like a Sisyphusian nightmare.

I'm not fighting my difficulties nearly well enough to feel qualified to author my own posts. Hearing from people who are managing is more likely to help. If nothing else, maybe a Rational Support Group would be a lot of fun.

To my frustration, the majority of the results I found were not scholarly. Then again, the only database I have access to is Google Scholar, which is utter crap for finding specific results.

If anyone has access to a decent scholarly database, I'd much appreciate a quick search. It seems possible that this idea "mental illness is highly correlated with intelligence" is just another Lucy-esque pop psych idea with little truth.

I think my point still stands- mental illness is still really common. And I know a lot of intelligent people have a mental illness. I don't think we should ignore the skewed thinking of mental illness even if the ratio of metally ill to mentally normal people is exactly the same in average versus above average populations. The statistic I'm finding there is 1 in 5. I'm not finding anywhere that's properly sourcing that statistic, though. The article I read sourced the older report (in 2012) but didn't link to the newer one.

To my frustration, the majority of the results I found were talking about were not scholarly.

If you do look, you will find odd little relationships and hints. Maybe there's more autism among the close relatives of mathematicians and engineers. Maybe there are little hints that ADHD and schizophrenia are linked to creativity. Maybe there's more bipolar disorder among performance artists. Maybe depressed people are better writers. Maybe. These little hints and bits and bobs of evidence indicating trade-offs are rarely as straightforward as finding elevate... (read more)

5emr11y

I agree that the relationship is separate question. I did find some links though: Here is a Swedish conscripts study, finding that pre-morbid IQ was negatively associated with later adult depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia, but positively related to mania, measured by hospital admittance. This New Zealand study replicates this: Low childhood IQ predicts depression, anxiety, while higher IQ predicts bipolar. These are about the best "large homogeneous" population studies I could find, in two more-or-less standard Western cultures. There is one study that tracked some particularly high performing children through adulthood, but the results weren't much different regarding mental illness than a normal high intelligence sample would be. Needless to say, it gets complicated when you look at populations that are preselected (college students, etc) or more diverse. Most popular articles that claim a uniform association are looking at some narrow populations (e.g. famous artists), or reporting how intelligence relates to different presentations of a given mental illness (e.g. intelligence seems to the presentation of anxiety). Even assuming genetic risk for a mental illness was unrelated to education or intelligence, you'd expect something like this given the environmental correlates: Better family conditions early on, better social status later. While there are some environmental stressors that are probably associated with higher intelligence (graduate/medical/law school, perhaps more status anxiety?), these are probably not severe enough to outweigh the stressors in the opposite direction.

7Lumifer11y

That is entirely a function of how widely do you define "mental illness". You set the bounds of normality narrowly and you get that mental illness is common, you set them far out and mental illness becomes a rarity.

58

Can we talk about mental illness?

58

58

58

Can we talk about mental illness?

58

58