
Existential Depression in Gifted Children and Adults (2009) [pdf] - sillysaurus3
http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/dabrowskis_theory_existential_depression_feb09.pdf
======
Retr0spectrum
> As one child described it, they feel "like abandoned aliens waiting for the
> mother ship to come and take them home"

This is exactly how I felt. I can remember thinking those exact words when I
was very young - although I didn't really start questioning the nature of
reality until my early teens.

At some point, I realised that these thoughts were only causing depression, so
I decided to simply stop thinking about them. I also became apathetic, and
detached from my own emotions.

Ultimately, my own existential depression led to self-destructive behavior -
perhaps this was related to the coping strategy of "Seeking novelty and
adrenaline rushes".

Edit: I would like to add that I do not consider myself gifted. I simply have
a rather narrow set of interests which I have become good at. I think it is
particularly common for "technical" people to be told they are gifted, because
to the untrained observer their skills can seem like wizardry.

~~~
facetube
Being called gifted only made it worse. I was not. None of them were. I'm
still not. It was a lie. Why couldn't people just give me credit for working
hard? That was the truth. Why was my success some magical unexplainable innate
attribute?

~~~
PostOnce
I was a gifted kid, I got D's all through school because fuck doing that
busywork, and then slept through college and did the bare minimum to graduate
with honors, which means only studying for the exams in the car on the way to
school... Meanwhile other people worked really really hard to graduate with a
3.0

Please tell me how my success is due to my hard work and not the luck to have
been born to my smart-but-relatively-poor parents.

I know other people can spend their life working hard and not get to where I
am, and people can work less hard than me and get a lot further. This isn't a
game with very structured rules. Life is chaos, and you're doing yourself and
society at large a disservice by ascribing your success solely to "hard work",
because applying that dogma to people with an IQ of 90 isn't going to work out
well on a large scale.

~~~
facetube
Or, a different interpretation: what's the benchmark for gifted? Who's picking
these people out of the crowd, and how? The programs I saw didn't test
objectively, were absurdly vulnerable to parental arm-twisting, and in some
cases were drawing from a student body that was, on average, performing well
below grade-level.

(N.B. Amount of hard work still dwarfed by blind luck.)

------
eli_gottlieb
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22998852](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22998852)

BACKGROUND:

Happiness and higher intelligent quotient (IQ) are independently related to
positive health outcomes. However, there are inconsistent reports about the
relationship between IQ and happiness. The aim was to examine the association
between IQ and happiness and whether it is mediated by social and clinical
factors. Method The authors analysed data from the 2007 Adult Psychiatric
Morbidity Survey in England. The participants were adults aged 16 years or
over, living in private households in 2007. Data from 6870 participants were
included in the study. Happiness was measured using a validated question on a
three-point scale. Verbal IQ was estimated using the National Adult Reading
Test and both categorical and continuous IQ was analysed.

RESULTS:

Happiness is significantly associated with IQ. Those in the lowest IQ range
(70-99) reported the lowest levels of happiness compared with the highest IQ
group (120-129). Mediation analysis using the continuous IQ variable found
dependency in activities of daily living, income, health and neurotic symptoms
were strong mediators of the relationship, as they reduced the association
between happiness and IQ by 50%.

CONCLUSIONS:

Those with lower IQ are less happy than those with higher IQ. Interventions
that target modifiable variables such as income (e.g. through enhancing
education and employment opportunities) and neurotic symptoms (e.g. through
better detection of mental health problems) may improve levels of happiness in
the lower IQ groups.

~~~
tokai
I think the woes of intelligent people are the mental version of first world
problems. Unintelligent people are sad and lonely too - and if the research is
true - even more so than clever ones.

The myth that despair companions intelligence is properly due to confirmation
bias. You don't have many stupid people talking or writing about the hurt they
feel from being. Or its just a nice thing to believe to find exaltation in
one's own suffering.

------
rybosome
I struggled quite a bit with an existential crisis a little over a year ago.
The sense of despair I felt over the lack of innate purpose and meaning in
life made it hard to get out of bed in the morning. I recovered from this
aspect of it by reminding myself that evolution happened to shape me with a
mind which craves purpose; so just as I fulfill my need for food, sex and
companionship, I can create a sense of meaning for myself to meet this need.

The sense of meaning came from being, as Neil degrasse Tyson says, "A good,
strong link in the chain of life". I decided to simply be a good human who
attempts to be present and care for my fellow humans, to honor and respect
life, and to try to leave society more healthy and stable. This is enough for
me. Unfortunately, the existential risks which plague us (nuclear war,
catastrophic climate change) not only frighten me because of the horrors I
would experience, but also because they would erase my purpose. Grappling with
the idea that humans could be wiped out due to our apathy, greed and
proclivity towards violence is so thoroughly depressing that my only recourse
is distracting myself. I meditate, get lost in friends, work and video games,
enjoy travel, and try not to think about it. If civilization or our species
will be destroyed within my lifetime, I want to at least have enjoyed the time
I had.

------
qwertyuiop924
I don't know about "gifted," but I certainly suffer from this. I suspect most
people have at some point.

I don't think of myself as "gifted." Some people have said I am, but I doubt
it: I work hard, I read, I acquire knowledge. Anyone can do that.

Besides, even if I am gifted, It's not a healthy attitude to have. You start
to get presumptuous, and arrogant, which means that you'll learn less. And I'm
arrogant enough: I don't need a swelled head.

In short, statistically, I'm probably not gifted, and it's unhealthy to
believe you're gifted anyways, so even if I am, I'm better off not knowing.

This might be totally insane, but it seems reasonable to me...

~~~
jacalata
Some of the most arrogant people I know reject the notion that they are gifted
(as in, born lucky) in favor of the idea that they just work hard and anybody
else could do the same but everyone else is too lazy. I think there are some
definite positives in recognising the advantages you were born with.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
You can always be arrogant if you try hard enough. But not being arrogant is
far harder.

Personally, I believe that I might have had a bit of an advantage in some
fields. Not because I'm necessarily better, but because my approach functions
better in that area. But most people _can_ do the same thing if they wanted
to. It's merely that everybody has a limited amount of focus, and most people
choose to spend it differently. Looking down on them is unproductive, and also
incorrect: they're probably experts in something you don't know anything
about.

------
zizzles
"Gifted children" is just a special buzzword to make parents feel good about
their high-functioning-autism offspring. That's how it worked here in Canada.

My first encounter with such "gifted" students was in elementary school, they
had a class right next to ours. At the time, I never knew about the concept of
"gifted students" but what I remember clearly is this: They were constantly
bullied for their appearance and mannerisms (ie. very bad dress sense, lack of
hygiene, awkward personalities, poor motor skills) fast forward to today, none
of these past gifted-students are doing anything special or noteworthy in
academia and or the workforce (from my research)

This is just my experience, but perhaps I'm being too harsh.

~~~
force_reboot
In my experience, intelligence is correlated with bad dress sense, lack of
hygiene, awkward personalities and poor motor skills. I know a lot of
professional mathematicians, and they all would have been bullied for these
things things (like I was) if they went to my high school, though many of them
went to private high schools.

Before anyone downvotes me because presuming the existence of a group of
people that is more intelligent than others is elitist or arrogant, I would
point out that it is no more so that presuming the existence of a group of
people with less social skills or motor skills.

~~~
wbl
This is not actually true. Intelligence correlates with social skills
[https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2015-strenze.pdf](https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2015-strenze.pdf).
It's just that math departments select for people who want a job where they
have high degree of control over their environment and work on things they
chose and want to spend lots of time on, and this makes it a good choice for
high IQ people with autistic traits.

~~~
force_reboot
I don't really see support for that in the article, but most of the details
are in the individual studies. The study does say

 _Kanazawa notes that intelligence correlates positively with evolutionarily
novel activities, but the correlation with ancient activities is zero or even
negative. That is also evident in Table 25.1 , which mostly lists novel
school- or job-related forms of success that have the expected positive
correlation with intelligence, but one of the most ancient forms of success,
number of children, has a negative correlation (−0.11)._

I would guess that you are reading "social success" as "social skills" while
in the article's terminology they mean by "social success" things like career
success, education level etc.

As for mathematics, it's true that this is a very special case, and people
select into mathematics based on both ability and personality. All I can say
for certain is that I can identify a distinct group of people who are both
intelligent and have autism spectrum traits, and they seem to occur more often
than if these traits were uncorrelated.

------
throwaway-anon
> This kind of sensitive awareness and idealism makes them more likely to ask
> themselves difficult questions about the nature and purpose of their lives
> and the lives of those around them. They become keenly aware of their
> smallness in the larger picture of existence, and they feel helpless to fix
> the many problems that trouble them. As a result, they become depressed.

Psilocybin mushrooms have a similar effect, however ironically I have used
those experiences as a way of dealing with existential depression. Rather than
coming away feeling "helpless to fix the many problems" I feel more like I've
shed the weight of those problems.

~~~
weerd
I agree. There is no cure for existential depression, but the temporary
changes in perception that occur during a mushroom/acid trip can be a huge
boon. The sense of self is diminished as you are chemically forced to stare
into the void. This death of the ego is a powerful kick in the brain and makes
mortality more palatable.

------
lekeve
"As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. See, I made a graph. I make
lots of graphs." \- Lisa Simpson

[https://flowingdata.com/2008/06/20/lisa-simpson-on-
happiness...](https://flowingdata.com/2008/06/20/lisa-simpson-on-happiness-vs-
intelligence/)

~~~
agumonkey
Somehow I believe that the upper brain is here to deal with problems, and so
is naturally correlated to suffering.

------
jankins
Reminded me of a post recently that suggested liberal arts majors are
typically better coders. I felt pretty good about myself reading that one too
until I got to the part where it was written by somebody with a liberal arts
degree, and like this paper didn't really give any evidence to support the
claim except for some clearly self-serving unfalsifiable opinions.

There's some interesting stuff in here if you like to visit this realm of
thought but you could remove any reference to 'gifted' and you wouldn't lose
any of it.

~~~
naasking
> Reminded me of a post recently that suggested liberal arts majors are
> typically better coders.

Better coders compared to what? Here's some anecdotal data: I've interviewed
computer scientists and computer/electrical engineers for software work terms
for almost 10 years now. I administer a pretty simple technical test just
measuring the ability to read and understand a small function in C#.

Over the past ~8 years I've interviewed, less than half of computer science
students complete the test without any errors, or trivial errors due to simple
misunderstanding of the comments documenting the code. Probably ~80% of the
engineering students complete the test successfully.

Take from that what you will. Perhaps I'm looking at a biased sample because
the job descriptions I post simply don't attract the better CS students, but
do attract good engineering students for some reason. No idea.

------
jstewartmobile
There are way too many 'I's in this article for comfort.

It is a great ego-stroke to hear that you are depressed because you are a
gifted snowflake. Odds are, you are depressed because you are not doing the
right things (regardless of how gifted you may be).

------
voidhorse
I'm not going to touch on whether the 'gifted' only feel this sort of
constancy of existential fear and depression. I don't think that matters. I
think moving past it does.

It's a question of framing.

I have battled this sort of perspective, the existentialist depression, for a
long time.

I am finally beginning to realize the radical openness of life can be viewed
in another way. You can see this existential predicament we all share not as
something ultimately harrowing , but rather a gift.

The future truly is open. Radically so. Existence does precede essence--rather
there's no essence at all.

See what occurs as a gift, when you can.

The works of Samuel Beckett, though perhaps on a surface interpretation
nihilistic and perhaps depressing, are actually a point of positivity for me.
I find they really capture the open nature of life and its inherent lack of
structure, or apparent (key word) purpose, and the human propensity, which is
really quite admirable, to go on, in spite of all that.

The following are all quotes from Beckett I like to keep in mind when I am
viewing life in a grim manner and want to improve my mood:

but who cares how things pass, provided they pass.

the end is the beginning, and yet you go on.

A story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the
mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.

\----

The important thing, I think, is to live. You can't control how things pass,
but you can rest easier, perhaps, if you lay down your head knowing you at
least tried.

I had a professor whom I will always cherish that said "what if, could have,
should have, would have, if only" are the words of tragedy. I've finally taken
that lesson to heart.

An importnat step for me was deciding and forcing myself to go out and do
things I normally didn't do. I'm not an inherently social person, and I forced
myself to modify that. I'm still not a butterfly by any means, but getting out
there, meeting people, learning about them and how they lived their lives,
genuinely starting to care about them, that all helps. Solitude, while it can
be a sweet companion, I think is probably the worst possible thing to have
when facing this sort of condition of existential worry.

A story is not compulsory. It is written, if you write it.

Sorry for personal ramblings, but I've been through what I'd call existential
dread and its not fun, not fun at all. We only have one shot at this life
thing. At the end of the day, spending it in a state of perpetual negativity
is sorrowful. It's my hope, I guess, that maybe venting my own process of
change and moving on from this incessant feeling of damnation will help
someone else too, even just a little.

Keep on living guys.

~~~
stevens32
Much appreciated. Thanks for the post

------
mcguire
Did I miss it, or was there no mention of the worst, most depressing problem
of gifted children (or, most likely, adults): learning, and intuitively
understanding, that they are not the smartest person in the room.

------
hamiltonians
_They become keenly aware of their small ness in the larger pic ture of exis
tence, and they feel help less to fix the many prob lems that trou ble them.
As a result, they become depressed_

I have heard it's the opposite: that smarter people are happier. I think the
problem is these studies on happiness and psychology are so imprecise. maybe
also anecdotal evidence and cherry picking.

 _Other char ac ter is tics of gifted chil dren and adults also pre dis pose
them to exis ten tial dis tress. Because brighter people are able to envi sion
the pos si bil i ties of how things might be, they tend to be ide al ists. How
ever, they are simul ta neously able to see that the world falls short of
their ideals. Unfor tu nately, these vision ar ies also rec og nize that their
abil ity to make changes in the world is very lim ited. Because they are
intense, these gifted indi vid u als—both chil dren and adults—keenly feel the
dis ap point ment and frus tra tion that occurs when their ideals are not
reached. They notice duplic ity, pre tense, arbi trari ness, insin cer i ties,
and absur di ties in soci ety and in the behav iors of those around them. They
may ques tion or chal lenge tra di tions, partic u larly those that seem mean
ing less or unfair. They may ask, for exam ple, “Why are there such inflex i
ble sex or age-role restric tions on people? Is there any jus ti fi able
reason why men and women ‘should’ act a cer tain way? Why do people engage in
hyp o crit i cal behav iors in which they say one thing but then do the
opposite? People say they are con cerned with the envi ron ment, but their
behav iors show oth erwise. Why do people say things they really do not mean
at all? They greet you with, ‘How are you?’ when they really don’t want you to
tell them the details of how you are. Why are so many people so unthinking and
uncar ing in their deal ings with others? And with our planet? Are others
really con cerned with improv - ing the world, or is it simply all about self
ish ness? Why do people settle for medi oc rity? People seem fun da men tally
self ish and tribal. How much dif - ference can one person make? It all seems
hope less. The world is too far gone. Things get worse each day. As one
person, I’ll never be able to make a difference.” These thoughts are common in
gifted children and adults_

I think these concerns are common to most people...not just the smart

~~~
MawNicker
I suspect your notion of intelligence includes more than the quality itself.
Humans are complex systems and exist inside much more complex systems. If
intelligence were purely adaptive then there would be a lot more of it than
there is. If the adaptation of an organism didn't dominate the expression of
it's qualities then they would always be manifest; They are not. When they are
not, happiness is also often not. It is true that a more fully manifest human
is happier. Also that as their happiness and observable intelligence are
correlated. But what would result from intelligence that hadn't been able to
fully manifest? I suspect the expression of many of these concerns. Your final
statement equalizes on this point. In fact, the expression of these concerns
is absolutely not equal among humans. I can appreciate the hesitation to
accept their indication of higher intelligence. They're not remarkable
thoughts. They're absolutely not thoughts we want to reward. They are only
occasionally the product of excessive intelligence becoming maladaptive. A
person that is failing to cope takes a fairly regular form. This form is
ultimately _not_ an expression of their intelligence.

You seem to be talking about "adaptive" intelligence. I suspect this is in
fact the nearness to an optimal quantity and not merely more of the quality
itself. Also, that this fluctuates over time. Adaptation to it is a continuous
process of the meta-mind. Ignorance can be recognized as a form of unconscious
intelligence possessed by any finite thinking thing. The calculations of this
intelligence precede the existence of any particular mind and needn't be known
by it. Our capacity to know this form of intelligence is unlikely. Hence your
perception of imprecision. The thing you wish were precise never will be.
Psychology simply cannot talk about it. As a science it wouldn't intend to. It
can only theorize about definable qualities. To understand and properly
measure "adaptive" intelligence we would have to subvert the entirety of it's
effects. We would have to know what it deemed unworthy of being within the
finite knower; Merely to confirm that it was in fact unworthy of being known.
We can only pontificate about what "adaptive" intelligence is. Perhaps we can
assert it's the correlates of observable intelligence. This demands that it
doesn't fluctuate over time. Anything we can know to properly define it is too
finite. Knowing it would imply a more "real" intelligence we have yet to
define. We cannot "know" the meta-mind.

------
jimenezjrs
I wanted to share a couple of thoughts, because after reading the comments
here, there seems to be some kind of discomfort with the word "gifted". I too,
felt like the paper described what I've been through, but completely rejected
the idea of being gifted, as it should be, because it furthers marginalizes
the self from society. I believe that with some effort through introspection,
reading and practicing everybody could have similar opinions or knowledge as
the people described in those pages. But I had to look into what gifted meant
to the author first before assuring my discomfort and luckily, I found a
couple of definitions on the website, which are different at what everybody
here is thinking he meant.

"Gifted and talented children are those identified by professionally qualified
persons who by virtue of outstanding abilities are capable of high
performance." I want to note the word "capable". A lot of you, I'm sure, have
come to realize that you learn fast, and faster than most people around you,
and that you have different interests: sports, music, intellectually,
leadership etc. That means that you don't have to be as Mozart or Einstein to
enter that definition of gifted.

The second thing I wanted to say was a little bit of my experience. Yes, I'm
an idealist and have strong emotions. After realizing the joke that society is
I became conflicted. First, because I came to realize that we all are at fault
of "this way of life" by playing along with it. Second, because I can't do
anything about it to accomplish the ideal world that I sought. And lastly,
because nobody that I knew thought or felt like I did, and that, made me
different and felt alone. I read some books that further threw me into the
abyss, because I hadn't experience enough or wasn't mature enough
intellectually to understand the good in them. Especially Camus' "The
stranger", a novel that talks about the absurdity of life.

To make my comment shorter so that you don't get bored. I read Sartre, and
found in paragraph what life represents for me, and that set me "free", as I'm
an atheist, that knew there was no meaning to life, and thus, felt my
existence and everything I did irrelevant:

“Man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself,
yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for
everything he does.”

For me, that was how I started to feel ok. I was free to do everything I
wanted, but I too, was responsible of everything, "good" and "wrong" of the
consequences. That meant "I was" what "I did", not what I thought me to be;
Seneca gave a great example when he said: "A coward, makes himself a coward",
and I didn't want to be a coward anymore. It was time to live what I thought
life should be. And then, I read Seneca's letters to Lucilius, and found in
them, agreeable and useful ways in living a more content life. And it has led
me to a better path (individually speaking), "the one less traveled by, and
that has made all the difference".

------
ianai
At a very young age, I remember stairing at myself in the mirror and realizing
I am I, and asking but what am I?!

------
Netcob
Another name for "common sense" which isn't that common for some reason.

------
platz
I hope folks don't interpret their depression as evidence that they are one of
the 'gifted' ones—an error of affirming the consequent.

No-one on this forum is just average, right? Where all the women are strong,
all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average (!) .

~~~
qwertyuiop924
Yep. I think most of us have this, gifted or no.

And plenty of people on this forum are average. Including me.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that the average high school student doesn't browse
HN, so maybe I'm not average in that respect...

Also, that joke was terrible. And it made me sad.

~~~
Alexqw85
The quote/joke comes from the intro of Garrison Keillor's radio show "Lake
Wobegon", about life in a fictional city in Minnesota. So, hopefully that
makes it a little less depressing. :-)

\---Alex

~~~
qwertyuiop924
No, nonononono. I _got_ the joke. That's why I'm sad.

Keilor's finally retiring this year :-(.

------
dschiptsov
Memes, memes everywhere..

Existential depression, my ass! Gifted adults, and even children, would surely
read things like Stepenwolf, On The Road, Cuckoos Nest, Nausea, Age Of Reason
and the likes and cure themselves.

Depression is nothing but a set of acquired habits. Change in behavior, caused
by traveling and excessive reading, will produce a different perspective upon
so called reality and an altered set of habits which will change ones
personality. For better or worse.

This kind of CBT goes back to the seers and sages of the East and the first
great philosophers of the West somewhere about 600 B.C. It still works.

~~~
itsjareds
Maybe we're discussing different definitions of the word "depression" here,
but depression isn't simply "walked off" or fixed with a change of
perspective. To suggest so both ignores the reality of depression as a mental
illness and repeats the same myth that people who are depressed are just
confusing themselves.

~~~
dschiptsov
Some people just did it. Some even wrote books based on such experience.

