A news story about two Caltech students who died of suicide in the weeks before the recent commencement made me wonder again: Do more gifted people die from suicide? Are high ability people more vulnerable?

The Caltech students who died were senior Jackson Ho-Leung Wang, a mechanical engineering student from Hong Kong, and junior Brian Go, a computer science and applied and computational mathematics major from Maryland.

The Caltech Counseling Center page Depression/Suicide Prevention reports: “In the general U.S. population it is estimated that 2 to 3 percent of men and 4 to 9 percent of women are depressed at any given time.  Suicide is now the second leading cause of death in U.S. college students, and suicide in the young has tripled over the past 45 years.”

The Hoagies’ Page on Depression and Suicide declares, “Although it is a popular notion that gifted children are at risk for higher rates of depression and suicide than their average, no empirical data supports this belief, except for students who are creatively gifted in the visual arts and writing (see Neihart & Olenchak..). Nor, however, is there good evidence that rates of depression and suicide are significantly lower among populations of gifted children.”

Another expert source notes, “There seems to be a greatly increased rate of depression, manic-depressive illness, and suicide in eminent creative people, writers and artists especially. The incidence of mental illness among creative artists is higher than in the population at large.”

From Creativity, the Arts, and Madness – by Maureen Neihart, Psy.D.

One example of a creatively gifted person who died by suicide was Sylvia Plath [1932 - 1963]. She published her first poem when she was eight and was “Sensitive, intelligent, compelled toward perfection in everything she attempted,” according to the Short Biography on sylviaplath.de.

“She was, on the surface, a model daughter, popular in school, earning straight A’s, winning the best prizes.”

She described one of her suicide attempts in her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. “After a period of recovery involving electroshock and psychotherapy Sylvia resumed her pursuit of academic and literary success, graduating from Smith summa cum laude in 1955 and winning a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, England.”

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[Description from Youtube:] “One of the most talented singers the world has seen – Nora Foss Al-Jabri (13) from Norway singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”

Nora’s management: aktomter@online.no www.anjazz.no

> See more videos at Oprah’s Search for the World’s Smartest and Most Talented Kids.

Daniel Tammet is able to recite 22,514 digits of pi from memory. An author with autistic savant syndrome, he thinks such astounding abilities are not due to some cerebral or genetic fluke, but based on an associative form of thinking and imagination.

He thinks differences between savant and non-savant minds have been exaggerated, to the detriment of how most of us value our own abilities and develop our talents.

In his new book, Tammet explains that people may consider his kind of extraordinary ability as just that – extraordinary, out of the realm of possibility for non-savant people, but he thinks that is a wrong presumption.

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gifted adults, gifted adult information, gifted adult personality, psychology of giftedness

To avoid being seen as too weird or different, and to fit in better with others, gifted children often learn to stifle or cover up their unusual cognitive and other abilities. As adults, many still follow a pattern of hiding.

When she began directing in the forties, Ida Lupino sometimes claimed not to know the best way to line up a shot or specify a line reading, explaining “Men hate bossy women. Sometimes I pretend to know less than I do.” [From my article Gifted Women: Identity and Expression.]

She was working in a more restrictive and even misogynistic era (the photo is Lupino directing a scene in her movie “Mother of a Champion,” 1951), but some research on contemporary gifted girls and women indicates they often suppress their advanced abilities.

But covering up, not acknowledging, or discounting our talents and abilities is not just something done by girls and women.

“Unfortunately most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them,” Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton declare in their book Now, Discover Your Strengths.

“Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers, and by psychology’s fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected.”

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raising gifted kids, parenting gifted kids, gifted adolescent relationships

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Photo: Clarence So of Diamond Ranch High in Pomona cheers on classmates at a regional decathlon at USC. Another decathlon was held at UCLA.

From article: In L.A. County, a battle of the brains, by Esmeralda Bermudez and Ruben Vives, Los Angeles Times February 8, 2009. “A day of decathlons, spelling bees and science bowls put the brightest students to the test. More than 100 high schools faced off in two regional decathlons at USC and UCLA, while 25 more competed in a science bowl at Caltech.”

Academic competitions and other social situations can bring together gifted teens in ways that enhance not only their intellectual growth, but their exploration and development of meaningful relationships.

High Intelligence Specialist Deborah L. Ruf, Ph.D. notes “The level of giftedness has a profound effect on how comfortable in different situations the young person will be…

“If the youth is part of a group, as in an advanced placement class, finding pals and receiving positive social feedback from classmates is more likely than if the young person is forced to sit through general education classes with students who are on a completely different intellectual, and interest, plane than he is.

“Intellectual level, per se, does not contribute to poor social skills.  Too much time with people who are nothing like us can warp how we solve the intricate problems of learning how to get along with others.”

From her article Independence and Relationship Issues in Intellectually Gifted Adolescents.