Why Do People with High IQs Suffer More Often from Mental Disorders and Physical Illnesses?

What price do people with high IQs pay for their brilliance? We explore why highly intelligent people are more likely to suffer from mental disorders and physical illnesses, and whether there’s any way for them to protect themselves from mental health issues.

It’s commonly believed that people with high IQs excel in many areas of life. They tend to receive the best education, land the most desirable jobs, and likely have higher incomes than people with average IQs.

But it turns out that things aren’t quite so optimistic and rosy. It is precisely a high IQ that is most often the cause of mental and immunological disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, various anxiety disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), as well as allergies, asthma, and immune problems.

Why such an injustice? A study, the results of which were recently published in Intelligence, examines in detail the mechanisms that may underlie this phenomenon.

When we talk about IQ, we are referring to the system of testing what is called “intelligence” that has evolved to the present day. The fact is that “intelligence” is a cultural concept, so an engineer, an artist, or a psychologist will understand the word differently. This abstraction takes on concrete meaning only within specific cultural contexts. Nevertheless, we use the word “intellectual” to describe people who are able to acquire useful knowledge and use it to solve complex problems, drawing on logic, intuition, creativity, experience, and wisdom.

The study’s authors tested 3,715 members of the American Mensa Society—the largest and oldest organization of people with high IQs. The aim of the study was to examine the prevalence of certain conditions among them compared to the same indicators in people with average IQs.

It turned out that highly intelligent people are 20% more likely to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), 80% more likely to have ADHD, 83% more likely to exhibit elevated anxiety levels, and 182% more likely to develop at least one type of mood disorder.

As for physiology, people with high cognitive abilities are 213% more likely to suffer from allergies, 108% more likely to develop asthma, and 84% more likely to develop autoimmune diseases.

To determine how chronic stress, accumulated in response to adverse environmental factors, affects the connections between the brain and the immune system, researchers turned to the field of psychoneuroimmunology.

It turns out that in highly intelligent people, their passion for solving problems and puzzles triggers what is known as intellectual hyperexcitability and hyperreactivity of the central nervous system. On the one hand, this contributes to their deep understanding of the essence of things and aids in scientific and creative work; on the other hand, this heightened reactivity of the nervous system leads to overexertion and, consequently, to depression or emotional instability as a kind of defense mechanism against overexertion.

It is well known that the intense emotional response to the environment experienced by writers, artists, and poets requires constant reevaluation and reflection. If this need does not find a sufficiently effective form of expression—that is, if it does not take the form of a novel, a painting, or a poem—it subsequently leads to either heightened anxiety, mania, or even depression.

People with heightened nervous excitability and a capacity for empathy and compassion may react more strongly than the average person to ordinary, seemingly harmless external stimuli (sound, color) simply because they possess a greater perceptual capacity. But when these reactions accumulate and are not properly channeled, they can lead to reduced stress resilience or chronic stress.

This disrupts the immune system’s functioning, as the body believes it is in chronic danger. It doesn’t matter whether this danger is real or imagined; the cascade of physiological reactions is set in motion: millions of hormones, neurotransmitters, and signaling molecules are released. When these processes are activated too frequently, our body and brain suffer, and our overall immune balance is disrupted. This can lead to asthmatic and allergic symptoms, as well as autoimmune diseases.

There is a belief that gifted children often suffer from allergies or asthma. Indeed, data from a study published in Intelligence show that 44% of those with an IQ above 160 suffered from allergies 20% more often than their peers.

The results of this study, along with previous research, led the authors to emphasize the importance of integrating mind and body for people with high IQs:

Hypersensitivity to external events or events in the mental realm, as well as the mental overload that highly intelligent people endure, automatically place them in a high-risk group.

Obsessive thinking, anxiety, and ruminating—which accompany the deep mental processes and intellectual work of scientists, poets, and other practitioners of creative intellectual labor—may cause their minds to get stuck in “fight,” “fight,” or “freeze,” which then triggers a cascade of immunological events. […] After all, ideally, the immune system should maintain a balance between inflammation and the anti-inflammatory response. The immune signal should “light up” and then fade away. However, in individuals who experience chronic overexcitement (including patients with autism spectrum disorders), this system appears not to have reached equilibrium, and therefore the alarm signals remain chronically activated.

The study’s authors conclude that the relationship between high intelligence and an increased risk of physical illnesses and mental disorders is undoubtedly important and warrants further study. But it is already clear today that this gift can be either “a catalyst for expanding human potential and self-actualization, or a harbinger of imbalance and debilitation.”

To ensure that people with high IQs do not lose their quality of life, it is important for them—more than anyone else—to “remember the rumble of thunder that usually follows the flash of insight.” One should also not forget about the season of melancholic rains that may follow setbacks. And if one is prepared for this and mentally equipped to handle it, one can look forward to many years of creative work in a healthy body.

Translated by S.V. Belukhina

Published in “Monocle” on July 17, 2018

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