Why are Gifted Individuals so Prone to Existential Depression?
The essential features of giftedness are an intense drive to acquire and master new information, a protean imagination, spontaneous insights, leaps of imagination, clairvoyance, a finely tuned aesthetic sensibility, a razor-sharp intellect, a capacity to be inspired, and uncanny physical abilities. These are the hallmarks of giftedness and the building blocks for spectacular accomplishments. They allow Gifted Individuals to experience the world in rich, complex, and spiritual ways.
These features can be a source of intense pride and personal power, but they can also lead to feelings of alienation, detachment, isolation, disillusionment, and a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance. These are the symptoms of Existential Depression.
How Can an Existential Depression Develop from the Experience of Being Gifted?
Gifted children often feel as though they have left childhood prematurely, entered adulthood too early, and left their peers behind.
Even at a young age, they are aware that their ability to see, do, and imagine beyond the ordinary sets them apart from their peers. This power to spontaneously and automatically discover and create in outsized ways allows them to dream of grand successes. However, this turbo-charged experience can make them feel isolated and ungrounded. Instinctively, young gifted children feel something has gone terribly wrong: somehow they’ve left their childhoods early, skipped adolescence, and entered a world that only belongs to adults. In this emotional limbo, the magic of giftedness can coexist with guilt, shame, isolation, and detachment. Not only have gifted children trespassed, but they have also left their peers far behind. Often, these feelings can be the beginning of Existential Depression.
Gifted adults too may have unanticipated intuitive experiences that can be unsettling. Some of these may even lead to remarkable discoveries.
“If we are going to work together in therapy, you have to promise not to call me gifted, it’s an elitist concept, I can’t stand it, I hate it.”
Examples of the Spontaneous Intuitive Processes Associated with Giftedness
Orhan Pamuk (2004) in “Snow” (chap. 10, p.81) describes a particular piece of writing as a “flash of inspiration” – like someone whispering in his ear – and yet during the process of writing in this way, he was in constant doubt about its self-worth.
Michael Brown (1994) in Martin et. al.’s “A Nobel’s Eye View of Scientific Intuition” (Int’l Journal of Science Education V.16#4, pp161-162) describes the remarkable, unexplainable process of discovery and exploration in his laboratory: “It felt like we were guided by an invisible hand – we never seemed confused about the path forward.”
For a fascinating account of how an intuition enabled the Nobel Prize scientist Enrico Fermi to transform the future of physics see: Holton, G.(1998) The Scientific Imagination. Harvard University Press. pp. 155 – 156.
In the course of their work, many accomplished adults can identify and acknowledge these spontaneous intuitive processes that pop up just at the right time. Gifted adults may be in awe of how and why these experiences occur, but they seem to welcome, use, and enjoy them without conflict or distress.
Many gifted children, however, are deeply conflicted about their consistent ability to reach beyond the ordinary where they, for example, need only to see the shape of a problem and instantly know its solution. The secret pride of having this uncanny – and powerful – ability is overshadowed by anxiety about how easy it is – at any point in time – to outdistance their peers.
Sadly, many gifted young people find these spontaneous, unexplainable processes difficult to accept and value as part of being gifted. Because of their difficulty accepting the reality of their giftedness, they interpret them as evidence that they are facile and clever, or worse, cheaters, liars, and imposters. For many gifted young people, the effortless processes that can end in high-level accomplishments rarely lead to self-esteem. They instead seem to lead to denial and feelings of guilt and shame.
Gifted Individuals can be Disappointed when They Can’t Find Answers to the World’s Complex Social/Moral/Ethical dilemmas.
This distress and confusion extends to the how and why of their giftedness.
Parents, teachers, and mentors may be fascinated by a gifted child’s ability to explore the “Big Existential” questions: Where did we come from? Why are we here? What’s life’s ultimate purpose and meaning? Why is there so much injustice and moral/ethical duplicity? A gifted child’s inability to find answers to these questions is unsettling. Even more disturbing is a gifted child’s inability to answer their own personal existential questions: Why was I given these special qualities and abilities that allow me to function at much higher levels than my peers? What am I supposed to do with them – develop them for myself and aspire to be the best or help others less fortunate than me? If I use them to follow my own interests and perfect my own abilities, does it mean I’ve become narcissistic and self-absorbed? What happened to my altruistic concern for others? What did I do to deserve them? What should I do to keep them?
Confusion about how to answer these questions and worry that, as young children, they shouldn’t even be thinking about these issues can lead to feelings of shame and guilt that can develop into the symptoms of Existential Depression.
Why Do Normally Endowed Individuals Rarely Develop Existential Depression?
Many normally endowed individuals worry about themselves and their place in the world. This is especially true during developmental transitions when the comforts and security of their current phase need to be given up for the excitement and challenges of the next: can I handle the work in the next grade level? Will I survive in a bigger school? Will I find a new group of friends?
Although these worries can be intense and cause plenty of suffering, they generally are short-lived and episodic. When they become persistent preoccupations without resolution, they can lead to feelings of alienation, isolation, disillusionment, detachment feelings of meaninglessness and dissociation – the symptoms of an Existential Crisis.
Normally endowed individuals also have concerns that go beyond their narrow personal ones. They, like their gifted counterparts, have questions about the nature of human existence – where did we come from; what are we supposed to be doing here; why is there so much cruelty and dishonesty amidst so much good and beautiful?
But, unlike their gifted counterparts, these concerns rarely become ones that cause intense distress. When they do become more of a focus, it’s usually because they have been displaced from unresolved personal or family worries.
When normally endowed individuals do develop forms of extreme emotional distress – distress that may feel like a threat to their very existence (for example during an adolescent identity crisis) – whether from worries that are personal or concerns that are more social and philosophical – this extreme form of emotional distress rarely develops into an Existential Depression
Why Is This?
By and large, normally endowed individuals, unlike their gifted peers, are less concerned about being fiercely independent and are, during times of extreme emotional distress, willing to reach out for emotional support, guidance, and reassurance or are receptive to these from parents, teachers who may perceive their need. Also, normally endowed individuals are comfortable turning to a group of peers who are quite willing to invite someone new to join them in “blowing off” the heavy stuff so they can all enjoy a carefree popular culture.
Gifted Individuals and Existential Depression: Other Factors
Gifted Individuals’ Need for Independence and Fear of Revealing their Giftedness Often Prevents Them from Reaching out or Accepting Help
Some Gifted Individuals convince themselves they can avoid acknowledgement of their giftedness and sidestep public recognition of it by continuing the solitary pursuit of their areas of special interest. As they get older however, they often find that working in isolation doesn’t bring the rewards they hoped for – a reclusive lifestyle eventually diminishes their own pleasure and intensifies feelings of alienation, disillusionment and a sense that their life is slowly losing its meaning.
More Existential Distress comes when they watch their peers moving ahead in their personal lives – developing intimate relationships and establishing marriages and families. Now they fear that the special abilities and sensitivities that allowed them to be well ahead of everyone else are leaving them behind. Guarding their independence in the face of a deepening existential crisis – hoping they can use their superb intellectual abilities to think their way out of it – put them at great risk of developing an Existential Depression.
Unable to get beyond this emotional impasse often becomes the turning point when an Existential crisis becomes an Existential Depression.
A crucial factor in how an Existential Crisis becomes an Existential Depression is a Gifted Individual’s reluctance to reach out for help. Having avoided the experience of dependency when they were young children, they see the need for it as an indication of personal failure instead of a sensible strategy to protect their giftedness, its development, and their current well-being.
How Gifted Individuals Avoid Existential Depression
Like their normally endowed counterparts, Gifted Individuals are also ambivalent about moving up to their next developmental level. On the one hand, they are eager to use their prodigious intellect at a higher level. The possibilities for this are more likely if they’ve skipped a grade. Perhaps they will find friends with whom they can share their unique interests; friends who like what happens in the classroom and friends who want to dig into the big existential questions about life: its meaning and purpose; perhaps they won’t have to feel that erosive low-grade sense of alienation and detachment.
However, these exciting possibilities can be tempered by certain negative ones. As the work will inevitably get harder, Gifted Individuals begin to worry they’ll experience their first failures. Yet at the same time, they worry they’ll still be the smartest person in the room; and with a wider age gap, they worry it will be even harder to deal with the social issues – genuine friendships will still be out of reach.
In this context, some Gifted Individuals are prepared to confront their resistance to sacrificing their private time to live in their head in order to feel the genuine desire for social and intimate relationships and work on developing the skills necessary. They recognize the need to give up aspects of living in their own world to avoid more and more loneliness. It becomes clear that living in their own imagination is not a way forward.
And, as they get older, these types of Gifted Individuals also know they have to confront their biggest existential questions – ones that have plagued them since childhood:
How do I understand and accept the reality of my own giftedness and use it?
Why was I given these extraordinary abilities and sensitivities?
Do I deserve them?
What am I supposed to do with them?
How do I maintain them?
Do I even want them?
What good are they anyway?
Accepting and Embracing Giftedness… Reaching Out for Help When Complicated Worries Become Existential Distress
Faced with the intellectual and social challenges of a more advanced educational or occupational environment, some Gifted Individuals have the emotional maturity to accept the reality of their own giftedness and others’ reactions to it. Although this process of acceptance can be a difficult one, they find ways to do it without betraying a core part of their identity.
For some Gifted Individuals, the solution means becoming a leader in their field of interest. In this way, they can retain engagement in their interests and get the benefits of exploring them in both a private and social context. This strategy adds new stresses and dealing with new challenges – taking on the opportunity for personal power and receiving the power others are eager to give for the benefit of being mentored; managing their own emotional reactions to having power over others and managing the reactions of envy and jealousy as well as admiration. Whatever compromises are involved in giving up exclusive privacy and pleasure of their own explorations and discoveries, and the work of developing new talents in dealing with other people’s issues and social dynamics seems worth avoiding the worst of loneliness, isolation and other aspects of Existential Distress.
This doesn’t mean that some aspect of the arrangement can’t get out of balance and precipitate an Existential Crisis. But, having relinquished some independence, and experienced the benefits of depending on the interactions with others for their self-esteem and well-being, they are prepared to reach out or take recommendations and to reach out for help when existential issues become too much for them to handle on their own. This key factor – the willingness to reach out and depend on others for their well-being is what often prevents an Existential Crisis from becoming an Existential Depression.
Existential Depression: The Basic Psychological Pathway
The ultimate psychological conflict of many Gifted Individuals is how to accept the reality of their giftedness and use it to benefit themselves and others instead of denying it, disavowing it, or undermining this conflict is their core Existential Dilemma.
Because this conflict is often unconscious – completely out of a Gifted Individual’s conscious awareness – the outward manifestations are emotional volatility, self-defeating behavior, underachievement and inability to form a solid sense of identity.
The emotional stress caused by this ongoing unresolved psychological conflict about being gifted and how to use it – regardless of circumstance or relationships – is, for many Gifted Individuals, the underlying psychological pathway to Existential Depression.
