Gifted adults are often confronted with the problem of having too many abilities in too many areas in which they would like to work, discover and excel. Gifted adults are often driven by their giftedness and may be overwhelmed by the pressure of their creativity.
If you were a gifted child, chances are you've had some serious mental health struggles now that you're a gifted adult. Many of them may have stemmed from gift-specific traumas in your childhood, or even some that you're experiencing in your adult life.
Kids designated as gifted have long been thought to be more at risk of emotional issues, and to carry some of them into adult life, because of various factors: the National Association for Gifted Children, for instance, identifies "heightened awareness, anxiety, perfectionism, stress, issues with peer relationships, ...
Since gifted people learn quickly in at least one area, those other areas that take a little longer can feel like failure, and be painfully wounding to their self esteem. Many gifted people have a fierce inner critic that may prevent them from trying new things for this reason.
Gifted kid burnout in ADHD adults refers to the phenomenon where people who were identified as "gifted" during childhood experience a state of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion as an adult. While the term "gifted kid burnout" may not be about children, it does stem from childhood experiences.
Martin Miller believes his mother, the late, world-famous psychologist Alice Miller, was a great theorist, subjected him to emotional neglect and abuse. Now he's written a book about it.
While gifted children may not be any more susceptible to mental health issues as other adolescents, there are certain aspects of giftedness that may influence or amplify a gifted child's experience of mental health issues.
Gifted children are more prone to depression, self-harm, overexcitability, and learning deficits. A gifted student might be so paralyzed by her own perfectionism, say, that she refuses to hand in any assignments.
Without understanding and support, gifted kids face an increased risk of anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem, along with social and academic problems. Currently, experts estimate that up to 1 in 50 gifted kids drop out of school, while many more fail to live up to their full academic potential.
Gifted children are challenging to parent in many ways. The more gifted the child, the more often it seems the more the parent is frustrated with the discrepancy of someone able to do school several levels above age level but unable to remember to take their finished work to school.
Gifted children may be more likely to experience existential depression, as their minds tend to be more attuned to contemplating the big life and death issues facing the world.
For example, gifted children are typically more sensitive, empathetic, and in tune with their emotions overall. They think about things in more detail than other kids their age and tend to overanalyze, so when they see injustice in the world they may experience a sense of hopelessness from it.
Gifted kids often have advanced intellectual skills that allow them to perform at high levels and solve complex problems. But this intelligence is not always accompanied by high social and emotional skills. Socially and emotionally, gifted kids often develop at the same rate or even slower than their peers.
Heightened Sensory Processing
Their “hyper-awareness” of the world around them may increase their physical discomfort to loud noises, scratchy fabrics, or pungent smells, creating anxiety around certain physical stimuli.
Giftedness has an emotional as well as intellectual component. Intellectual complexity goes hand in hand with emotional depth. Just as gifted children's thinking is more complex and has more depth than other children's, so too are their emotions more complex and more intense.
However, empirical research has not demonstrated that anxiety is a greater problem for gifted children than it is for children who are not gifted. In fact, there is empirical evidence that intellectually or academically gifted children experience lower levels of anxiety than their nongifted peers.
Social development and skills: gifted and talented children
Gifted children can think faster and/or more deeply than other children their age. So they're often good at imagining what it's like to be in somebody else's situation. Sometimes these qualities mean your gifted and talented child gets along well with others.
A gifted child's IQ will fall within these ranges: Mildly gifted: 115 to 130. Moderately gifted: 130 to 145. Highly gifted: 145 to 160.
They tend to be especially perceptive in picking up on environmental cues, so they may be more sensitive to issues in the world and judgments from others. They also often feel overloaded and overwhelmed by information. Gifted students can be very hard on themselves as they strive for high standards.
A gifted student experiencing burnout might demonstrate the following physical and emotional symptoms: A change in sleeping and eating habits. Headaches, stomach aches or other physical issues. Panic attacks.
So the gifted child who exhibits psychomotor over excitability (abundant energy and need for movement) may look identical to an child with ADHD who is described as hyperactive.
Both giftedness and autism fall on a spectrum, so while there may be individuals who clearly fit into one box or another, some behaviors might be more ambiguous and require additional information, context, or professional opinions.
About 70% of autistic people have an intellectual disability, which means they have an IQ lower than 70. The remaining 30% have intelligence that ranges from average to gifted. Autism and intelligence are two separate characteristics. A person can be autistic with any level of intelligence.
While some gifted children may have a flair for the dramatic, that does not diminish the intensity of their emotions. These children may be experiencing what psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski called an emotional overexcitability. 2 That means that they actually do experience emotions more intensely than others.
We now know that individuals that fit into these categories not only have their own unique challenges, but they also share many similarities as well. Not only that, but they can occur together. In fact, about 50% of gifted children also have ADHD which adds complexity and additional challenges.