High Ability

Lily Cole was bullied and thinks it was because some kids bully sensitive children. Research indicates a large portion of gifted students are bullied.

She comments, “I was bullied because I have red hair, although actually, I think I was bullied because some kids bully sensitive children."

A report from Purdue University a few years ago said “Bullying in the gifted-student population is an overlooked problem that leaves many of these students emotionally shattered, making them more prone to extreme anxiety, dangerous depression and sometimes violence.”

Even people with exceptional talents can feel insecure and struggle with low self-esteem. Many think they are a fraud who will be found out.

Meryl Streep, for example, has said, “I have varying degrees of confidence and self-loathing…. “You can have a perfectly horrible day where you doubt your talent… Or that you’re boring and they’re going to find out that you don’t know what you’re doing.”

This is not an isolated feeling or an issue for only a few talented people.

Over the many years of researching creative people and reading many interviews with high ability people, I have seen quotes like Streep’s showing up often.

A number of people with exceptional abilities have used drugs and alcohol as self-medication to ease the pain of their sensitivity, or as a way to enhance thinking and creativity. Sometimes they risk addiction.

Beethoven reportedly drank wine about as often as he wrote music, and was an alcoholic or at least a problem-drinker. Among the many other artists who have used drugs, alcohol or other substances are Aldous Huxley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allen Poe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Allen Ginsberg, composers Beethoven and Modest Musorgski, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Eugene O'Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, and Tennessee Williams.

At least five U.S. writers who won the Nobel Prize for Literature have been considered alcoholics.

Video excerpts from the SENGinar (a webinar by SENG): "Understanding Overexcitabilities – The Joys and the Challenges" - presented by Susan Daniels, P...

Description from the SENG site:

Overexcitabilites – psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, imaginational and emotional – are often presented as personality traits and behaviors to be managed in terms of interactions at home and at school.

An ambitious new study suggests a surprising link between a child's IQ and his use of illegal substances as an adult...

In my article "Gifted, Talented, Addicted," I speculate that a number of people with exceptional abilities have used drugs and alcohol as self-medication to ease the pain of their sensitivity, or as a way to enhance thinking and creativity.

http://talentdevelop.com/articles/GTA.html