Is it possible to be too smart? Can you have so much going on upstairs that it causes you to be depressed?
A study just published in the British Journal of Psychiatry shows that smart kids are four times more likely to develop bipolar disorder than average kids. Assuming it’s true, what does it mean?
Bipolar
disorder being a crippling life-long mental illness, should parents
hope their kids just get average grades? Should a forensic psychiatrist,
knowing that a defendant once scored above 1400 on the SAT, be more
certain that he or she was not guilty of murder by reason of insanity?
Should schools expect that A students will be more likely to need mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics? Why not?
For decades, NAMI types have argued that mental illnesses
are chemical imbalances in the brain which cause disabilities needing
treatment, even prophylactic treatment. Now it looks reasonable to
theorize about a hypothetical chemical imbalance which causes bipolar
disorder and also makes people smart. Should we screen all straight-A
students and be prepared to treat them medically to keep them from being
so smart and going crazy...?
On the opposite side of this thing, GlaxoSmithKlein, maker of the antidepressant Paxil, just announced they won't even look
for new drugs in that class anymore, because it's way too hard to know
if they work. So ... if psychotropic meds may not even work, and if they
have side effects like suicide and diabetes ... um ... should we give them to kids ... at all?
This is going to get extremely complicated! As Gregg Easterbrook writes in Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed,
"Does it seem as though no matter how much you know and learn, you'll
never really be on top of things? Guess what--you won't."
Well,
here's a trick. Let’s give up this goofy, destructive and distracting
search for magic-button cures for mental-illness-as-brain-disease. Let’s
work out how to deal with different kinds of people, and stop
trying to make everyone be average and mechanical and the same. The
world will never become a better place because we can predict and
control standardized humans. It will only improve if we create more
truly new things, and communicate across wider and wider differences.
