Gifted Support

I had literally never heard of this before seeing this ask! I had to google it.

"Research suggests a higher prevalence of autoimmunity, allergies, and asthma among intellectually gifted individuals compared to the general population. This connection, often termed the "hyper-brain/hyper-body" theory (popularized by Dr. Ruth Karpinski), posits that an overactive nervous system, linked to intense intellectual functioning, may trigger heightened physiological reactivity and immune dysfunction."

HOWEVER:

Digging deeper, it looks like there’s no strong, well-established scientific evidence that intellectual giftedness is meaningfully linked to autoimmune diseases. The idea exists, but it’s mostly based on limited, controversial, or indirect findings—not a solid consensus.

It's one of those situations where a scientist published an article like, "Hey! Here's an idea! Here's an extremely limited study that suggests that we should probably look into this." And then non-scientists saw the article and went, "SCIENCE SAYS THIS IS DEFINITELY A THING!!!"

I'm gifted. I'm not autistic. My psychologist laughed and confirmed I'm not when I mentioned I had questioned if I was autistic when my wife got late diagnosed. (It was the red car effect and the overlap in neurodivergence. I saw autism everywhere for a year.) I took the RADs test in the back of one of Temple Grandin's books. I scored no where near autistic. I explain social situations to my wife and I have for the last 20 years.

Why can't giftedness and autistic be separate conditions that sometimes occur in one person?

I wish some autistic people didn't view giftedness as a threat. We didn't ask to be labeled or to be neurodivergent. The label itself is problematic and the idea of intellectual superiority (or any superiority) is problematic. That doesn't equate to gifted people are arrogant closeted autists. Can we support each other instead of attacking each other?

I am gifted and not autistic.

There are plenty of people who are autistic who are not gifted. There are plenty of people who are gifted who are not autistic.

I don't know where the idea that this venn diagram is a circle came from. I have definitely heard it before. But yeah, it's incorrect. There are lots of overlap in symptoms between quite a LOT of forms of neurodiversity, including autism, giftedness, ADHD, OCD, and more. But it's a messy venn diagram, not a neat, clean circle. And of course, there are a TON of people who are "twice exceptional / 2e" and have multiple diagnoses. Example:

(source)

And another one:

(second source)

In fact, during my childhood I went through several prolonged situations that caused trauma and stress... nothing severe like physical abuse, but my father’s abandonment and growing up with an autistic person who was never diagnosed and struggled with severe depression.

I haven’t reached this point with my therapist yet, so I deeply appreciate your response. I find it surprising to know about certain topics and still not realize they apply to your own life. I guess untangling what has been tangled for a long time isn’t a quick task...

Thank you again, and all the best!

I've gone through the same thing - looking up all kinds of things to try to figure out my own psychology and learn how to thrive in the world! It took me several years, but it can absolutely be done.

Your description of your childhood is 100% a recipe for C-PTSD. Mine was also caused by emotional abuse and stress rather than physical abuse. Our society really doesn't talk enough about how things that aren't physical abuse can also really mess a person up, especially a kid.

[If you DO have CPTSD, it can sometimes be hard to find a therapist who can actually treat it (most therapists THINK they know how to treat trauma but actually have not been trained to do so correctly). My own mental health journey involved finding an EMDR therapist who had been extensively trained in trauma therapy. Just mentioning because you said you hadn't gotten to certain things with your therapist yet.]

If you have a parent with undiagnosed autism, and you mentioned masking, you may want to look into autism on your own behalf. While some gifted kids without autism may also mask, masking tends to be more associated with autism than giftedness, and it sounds like you also may have a genetic predisposition to Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). ASD has such a diverse range of symptoms that it can sometimes be hard to identify at first!

I recently discovered that I’m a gifted person and that I had been masking my whole life (I went to therapy because I was going through a meltdown after a phase of extreme perfectionism).

For a moment, it was actually comforting to make sense of many things in my life, especially things from childhood. After reading and researching about it, I understand myself better, but what I’m experiencing right now is a deep disconnection from everything around me.

It feels as if I’ve moved into a different, higher mental plane, and it’s really isolating. I’m a strong person (I’m not going to do anything reckless), but it’s like witnessing, or having stepped into, that mental frame where many people become disconnected and eventually end up taking their own lives.

I’ll say it again: I’m a strong person. This is not a cry for help or anything like that. I know my way around exploring my inner world. Right now I’m simply hovering over what I described, and by sharing this I might find voices with more experience, and perhaps help make this experience more visible.

So grateful to have found this account. Thank you very much :)

Thank you for writing!

I think what you're describing might be some form of dissociation. I would strongly recommend discussing how you're feeling with your therapist. It also sounds like there's a possibility that you're dealing with Complex PTSD, which might be something to look into. I run a blog on that as well ( @c-ptsdrecovery ), and I can recommend the book "Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving" by Pete Walker as a way to explore the condition and see if it matches your experience.

"Perfectionism always creates a superhuman measure by which one is compared. And no matter how hard one tries, or how well one does, one never measures up. Not measuring up is translated into a comparison of good versus bad, better versus worse. Good and bad lead to moralizing and judgmentalness. Perfectionism leads to comparison-making. Kaufman writes, 'When perfectionism is paramount, the comparison of self with others inevitably ends in the self feeling the lesser for the comparison.'"

I don't know very much about your school and how its gifted program works. Do you have any more specific questions? Avoiding bullying is the same for gifted people as it is for anybody else (I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing...).