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Existential Depression in Gifted Children

davidsongifted.org

81–90 of 185 posts

Re: Existential Depression in Gifted Children

#81
post #2

Very thoughtfully written piece. One would wonder what this has to do with HN, but the content is universally applicable, therefore not only in regards to children. Plus, we could suppose that the majority of HN's users consider themselves gifted :) Anyway, read the article folks, you won't regret your spent minutes.

I posted it because I think HN attracts people who have the traits expressed in the article: - high potential for development - innately aware of problems in the world - over-exciteable - drawn towards 'escapes' that help them grow

Really? Here I thought HN mostly attracts white or East Asian mostly-male, mostly-20-30-something computer programmers who live in orbit around the Silicon Valley start-up industry.

Re: Existential Depression in Gifted Children

#82

While I've read a fair bit of existentialist works I've never seen this term, but I think I know what it means. I also think the article would be improved by just titling itself "Existential Depression". The narrow focus is odd, even if true, and might serve better as a footnote. There's the strangest feeling I come across from time to time, and I think "come across" is the only good way to describe it. Everyone has…

I believe it's a big mistake to use the phrase "everyone feels down every now and then" to cutify what can be a life threatening mental illness.

Re: Existential Depression in Gifted Children

#84
In the end all psychology boils down to our brain circuits. It is interesting that nature has shaped us so that we have a constant existential anxiety, maybe it even served some evolutionary purpose (or maybe not, and it's just a side effect that becomes more evident to the few gifted children)

Re: Existential Depression in Gifted Children

#85
post #62

I cried a little. I'm 18 and since 3rd grade I was in a special class for gifted children. I know this feeling so well, from my experience and from those of my classmates and friends, it literally hurts. I'm no psychiatrist but from my nonobjective personal experience depression in gifted children and your regular "normal" teenage depression are completely different, in symptoms as well as in cause, which I think the…

Just don't get too used to thinking being gifted is particularly rare and requires a different system to thrive. Many acquaintances of mine at a certain crimson ivy university grew up with similar notions, and got into a different kind of depression once being surrounded by other 'gifted' individuals - due to having the 'world view' they've internalized so far, around the notion of them being special, getting totally…

I completely agree. Your comment should be required reading for every "gifted" child.

Re: Existential Depression in Gifted Children

#87

While I've read a fair bit of existentialist works I've never seen this term, but I think I know what it means. I also think the article would be improved by just titling itself "Existential Depression". The narrow focus is odd, even if true, and might serve better as a footnote. There's the strangest feeling I come across from time to time, and I think "come across" is the only good way to describe it. Everyone has…

If you don't know it already, you might like a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay called Renascence.

Re: Existential Depression in Gifted Children

#88
post #14

Gifted children are intense? Has the author ever actually been around children? They're all intense. That's the nature of children! Of course, they may simply all be gifted until they're hammered into their little social boxes; I've often thought that. Some of us weirdos just can't be hammered as efficiently, or break before bending or something.

Gifted children are intense? Has the author ever actually been around children? They're all intense. That's the nature of children! You mean adults aren't intense? Wow, now I feel lonely.

Adults are far less intense than children, IMO.

I expect children to be intense about nearly everything. Small boo-boos and set-backs are devastating, and small wins create enormous excitement in 2 and 4 year olds. That, to me, is intensity.

It's perfectly normal for the majority of things in life to be intense in kids (and have more understanding for others' kids now), but it's entirely abnormal (and frankly inappropriate) in adults. Adults can have selective intensity and I look for that as a strongly positive quality in people I want to be around. Non-selective intensity is simply fatiguing, IMO.

Interuption: "Dude!!! Are you guys out of toilet paper in the upstairs bath?! Because if you are, I just wanted to remind you that there's a lot of it downstairs." (Silently: "No shit, I bought it and put it there; next, care to interupt my reading in five minutes to update me on the stock status of dish washing detergent?")

Re: Existential Depression in Gifted Children

#89
post #69

While I've read a fair bit of existentialist works I've never seen this term, but I think I know what it means. I also think the article would be improved by just titling itself "Existential Depression". The narrow focus is odd, even if true, and might serve better as a footnote. There's the strangest feeling I come across from time to time, and I think "come across" is the only good way to describe it. Everyone has…

> But with the cosmic sadness there is no going up one level, it's all there to ponder and still real. No snapping out of it. There are two mechanisms to cope with this without discarding or distorting it. Both are linked to accepting and expanding the comical (and cosmic) smallness of our existences. The first one I actually learned recently from reading Stephensons Anathem (which made me wonder if I'm reading that…

Just to play devil's advocate:

> accepting ... reality is always more fascinating, weird and grand than our brains can even begin to imagine ... We're along for a ride and that ride is awesome.

Sounds like defeatism and resignation. Why resign yourself to the "ride" and pretend that there's something nice about the long, arduous journey when you know very well that there's not much to see at the destination, or if you believe that everyone is riding in the wrong direction?

> If they figured out a way to give a damn, you can, too.

Sounds like conformism. What if all those people gave lots of damns about things that actually aren't worth a damn? Perhaps we should not waste our precious CPU cycles on caring about worthless things.

How do you convince a mind that thinks on the scale of trillions of years to care about a few thousand years of human idiosyncrasy at all? I don't think it will be that easy. Daily hugs might actually work better, because a hug doesn't even attempt to engage the intellect and therefore doesn't need to respond to counterarguments.

Re: Existential Depression in Gifted Children

#90
From the article, which is about a topic I discuss frequently in other online communities (including online communities hosted by the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that operates the website hosting the submitted article):

"In essence, then, we can help many persons with existential depressions if we can get them to realize that they are not so alone"

And this is why I strenuously oppose the term "existential depression" as a supposed designation of something that is rare in most people and more common among people who are "gifted." There is no evidence of such a thing. Rather, treating giftedness as a condition of life different from what most of our fellow human beings experience magnifies the sense of aloneness that too much of the gifted education literature promotes among people identified as gifted.

When I was young, I read a science fiction story by author Philip K. Dick in which he made a statement I have seen made in much the same form by many of the lousier authors on gifted education: that if your IQ is high, you are as different from above-average people as retarded persons are from normal people. That's baloney. The social distance hypothesis of IQ has little empirical support, and seems mostly to be a cultural hang-up of twentieth century America. When I lived in east Asia (after majoring in Chinese language at university) as a young adult, I discovered a new cultural perspective, the cultural perspective that if a person is smart, there is hardly anything better to do with the smarts than to learn how to get along with other people. As Confucius said, 三人行,必有我師焉 ("wherever three persons are walking, my teacher is surely among them"). Whatever my IQ score, I have plenty to learn from essentially everyone, and plenty of reason to feel kinship with my fellow human beings.

There is, however, a kind of isolation of the gifted that must be specifically counteracted. And that is the isolation of the gifted education literature, like the article kindly submitted here (by an author I have met at several conferences on gifted education) from the mainstream literature of psychology. Most gifted education gurus, and the author of this article is a salient example, have their highest formal degrees in education, from schools of education (such as from a "directional state university" that historically was a "normal school" for training teachers). The most rigorous research on human psychology--and psychologists have recently been painfully aware that all too little research on psychology is rigorous at all--

http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/

http://hci.ucsd.edu/102b/readings/WeirdestPeople.pdf

is gained by persons whose highest formal degree is in psychology, from a major research university. Very little of the best insights gained from recent decades of psychological research seeps into schools of education, especially those schools of education that have programs in gifted education.

The late author Dabrowski mentioned promptly in the article kindly submitted here and in much gifted education literature is an admittedly obscure writer (as acknowledged in the only book that collects commentary on his ideas,

http://www.amazon.com/Dabrowskis-Theory-Positive-Disintegrat...

which I read part of recently) who produced essentially no testable hypotheses. Dabrowski's ideas are vague and open-ended enough to allow making up dozens of anecdotes when speaking at conferences on gifted education, but provide no guidance whatsoever to help young people face tough issues in personal development.

The bottom line: the term "existential depression" is a euphemism used in the gifted education community for the same depression experienced by many people of varied IQ levels. The correct statement in the article submitted here is the statement that you help people experiencing depression by encouraging them to feel less isolated from the rest of humankind. And one of the best ways to do that for gifted people is to emphasize their commonality with the rest of humankind, rather than their IQ scores or poor fit age-graded school programs.

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

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