Why Smarter People Are More Likely To Be Mentally Ill
More than 30 studies have linked higher intelligence
to mental health disorders including major depression, bipolar disorder,
schizophrenia, and others.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
A
rising sense of dread heralds the new morning for our thinking man, who
first considers the shotgun leaning by the door before turning to the
coffeemaker — deciding that maybe tomorrow is the day.
For the late American novelist David Foster Wallace, that
doomsday came Sept. 12, 2008. After suffering for years from major
depression, one of the greatest and most influential writers in a
generation succumbed to illness with a hangman’s rope in the garage. In
death, Wallace joined a pantheon of notable artists and thinkers plagued
by mental health disorders such as depression, bipolar polar disorder,
and schizophrenia, among other ailments.
Indeed, society has long associated higher intelligence and
creative thinking with mental illnesses ranging from the slight to the
severe. Affecting some 2.5 percent of the U.S. population, bipolar
disorder alone has touched many of our greatest achievers, including
Vincent Van Gogh, Buzz Aldrin, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, and
Jackson Pollock to name just a handful. And although lacking a modern
diagnosis, surely Virginia Woolf — who drowned herself in 1941 — fit the
type.
Like the Sword of Damocles, higher intelligence may in some
ways curse its beneficiaries. Aside from the usual desire to
self-medicate, smarter people tend to drink alcohol and do drugs more
than average — perhaps seeking to drench a burning sense of curiosity
described by the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis.
Long before the Agricultural Revolution brought alcohol to humankind,
life on the African savannah during the Pleistocene helped design the
modern mind. “The human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing
with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral
environment,” evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, of the London
School of Economics, says of his theory.
In modern life, the opportunity to imbibe — or to otherwise
ingest mind-altering substances — presents an “evolutionarily novel”
situation explored more readily by the smarter, bolder ones among us. In
fact, the correlation is so strong scientists say the inverse is true:
People of lower intelligence are the least likely to drink or use drugs.
Now, scientists have identified a biomolecular connection between
curiosity as a trait and intelligence in general, as evidenced by a 2009
study in Neuron from researchers at the University of Toronto
and the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute of Mount Sinai Hospital.
Specifically, the neuronal calcium sensor-1 protein
was associated in a mouse model with spatial memory and curiosity.
Interestingly, that same protein has been linked in humans to bipolar
disorder and schizophrenia.
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Other research supporting a link between intelligence and mental health problems shows bipolar disorder may be four times as common among young adults who’d earned straight-A’s in school. Though long suspected, evidence for this connection was found by researchers at King’s College London, in a collaboration with the Karolinska Institutet in
Sweden by comparing Swedish national school records to diagnoses for
the disorder. “We found that achieving an A grade is associated with
increased risk for bipolar disorder, particularly in humanities and to a
lesser extent in science subjects,” lead researcher James MacCabe,
wrote in a study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry. “These findings provide support for the hypothesis that exceptional intellectual ability is associated with bipolar disorder.”
Perhaps not surpisingly, the correlation between A grades
and bipolar disorder was strongest among students excelling in music and
language, supporting popular notions about writers and artists with
regard to mental health. A similar study
from Jari Tiihonen at the University of Kuopio in Finland also supports
the link, although with arithmetic as a correlative for IQ. In mining
data on Finnish military conscripts, the Finnish researchers found an
almost unbelievably high correlation between high-scorers and those who
later received bipolar diagnoses — 12-fold.
“The finding of an association between progressively
increasing risk of bipolar disorder and high arithmetic intellectual
performance is rather surprising,” Tiihonen wrote, explaining the
arithmetic test requires not only mathematical skill but rapid
information-processing for the purpose of successfully completing the
timed exam. High scorers with such rapid processing power may also share
a tendency to experience mania, a state of high focus and psychomotor
activity. Along with bequesting humanity with advanced arithmetical or
psychomotor performance, past generations may have also left us with a
heightened risk for bipolar’s ups and downs.
Although some studies have shown no connection, more than
30 academic papers support a link between intelligence and bipolar
disorder — among related illnesses — as researchers continue to
experiment with mouse models and proteins, and to mine databases in
search of what's missing. Soon, science may give us improved medicines
to treat our maladaptive maladies of the mind. But at what cost to
society? Known for his mercurial moods and heavy substance abuse, the
late "Gonzo" journalist Hunter S. Thompson
once insisted he’d have it no other way. “Without the booze and drugs,"
he said, "I’d have the mind of a third-rate accountant."
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