Is a Gifted Student More Likely to Feel Stress than Others? Many gifted youngsters have a heightened sensitivity to their surroundings, to events, to ideas, and to expectations. Some experience their own high expectations for achievement as a relentless pressure to excel.
Gifted individuals tend to be emotionally sensitive and empathic, making the normal rough and tumble of the playground stressful for them. Because they often feel they are held to higher standards than their peers, they can find it difficult to accept criticism (anything short of perfection is felt as failure).
Studies show that gifted children have a higher risk of experiencing mental health issues, like anxiety, depression, and even suicidal thoughts. Because gifted children have different capabilities than their peers, other children may find them intimidating.
Giftedness becomes a burden because you ALWAYS will be different from the norm. While this can be fine and even a blessing at times, you don't get a choice, and you are always confronted with having to adapt, adjust, accommodate. It is rarely easy.
The problems gifted children sometimes face with socializing often stem from their asynchrony and educational setting. Asynchronous development, or uneven development, is often considered a core trait of giftedness. These students may be college age intellectually but still 12 in terms of their social skills.
Not every child displays intensity in all five, but it is understandable that gifted children who tend to have vivid imaginations, overanalyze, or over-empathize may be more likely to experience anxiety. In particular, OEs that lend themselves to catastrophic thinking may increase a child's risk of anxiety disorder.
Gifted trauma stems from childhood issues with feeling like you don't belong anywhere because of your gift. Bullying, starving for mental stimulation, school mismatch, and other issues specific to the life experience of the gifted child may also contribute both to the main mental health issue and gift-specific trauma.
Even though the gifted are no more susceptible to mental illness than anyone else, some gifted children and teens struggle with overthinking, worry, or cautious alertness. Their nervous system seems wired for heightened reactivity. For some, obsessive thinking transitions into anxiety.
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.
Ability to see things from a variety of perspectives
Gifted students often find unique ways to view a situation or problem. They use their creativity and abstract thinking skills to find unique perspectives and solutions to problems, even when there is an easier way to go about solving.
When researchers compared a control group of gifted students who didn't skip a grade to those who did, the grade-skippers were 60% more likely to earn patents and doctorates and more than twice as likely to get a Ph. D.
Those who are considered “gifted” are especially likely to experience depression, particularly existential depression, a type of depression that centers around thoughts about life, death, and meaninglessness as the name might suggest.
ADHD AND GIFTEDNESS are sometimes described as having the same or similar characteristics. However, one diagnosis is considered a disability and one, a gift. Neither assumption is ideal in supporting the child identified with either ADHD, giftedness, or both, often referred to as twice exceptional or 2e.
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.
Mildly gifted: 115 to 130. Moderately gifted: 130 to 145. Highly gifted: 145 to 160. Profoundly gifted: 160 or higher.
Although there are no standard IQ levels of intellectual giftedness, some experts suggest the following IQ ranges: Mildly gifted: 115 to 129. Moderately gifted: 130 to 144. ighly gifted: 145 to 159.
The Giftedness Component and Emotional Needs
Giftedness, we learned, often comes with intense emotions, quirks, anxiety that manifests as anger, intelligence that can read as argumentative power struggles, and sensitivity to stimuli that can mimic processing disorders.
Giftedness can create problems and conflicts; being a gifted child can also mean difficulty socializing with age peers, thinking styles that don't always mesh well with the demands from the environment, even children who see themselves as little adults, challenging teachers and parents.
Signs of giftedness can appear as early as infancy and continue during the toddler and preschool years. Testing for giftedness and high IQ, however, usually takes place around age 5.
Common social and emotional experiences for gifted children can reflect: differences in their abilities compared to same-age peers. tendencies toward introversion and perceived issues with social acceptance. conflicts or anxieties associated with their inner experiences of giftedness.
People's brains vary. Research has shown that some people are born with a neurological make-up that can cause them to be more emotionally or intellectually intense, sensitive, and open to external stimuli than the general population. Gifted people belong to this category, though their reality is often not recognized.
However, Silverman points out, not all sensitive people are geniuses. Those who are the most gifted—the people who rank among the smartest 1 to 2 percent—tend to be both introverted and sensitive. “We have found that highly gifted individuals are more likely to be introverted than mildly gifted people,” she told me.
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.