Cognitive Abilities and Educational Attainment as Antecedents of Mental Disorders:
Interesting study. They are trying to tease out the part that cognitive abilities are related to mental illnesses from Educational Attainment. Cognitive abilities and educational attainment are related, but not a match. Educational attainment is rather a messy metric as it combines determination, intelligence, cultural expectations, luck, and opportunity. However, it has become a favorite because there is so much data. Think of how many times you are filling out a form at a doctor's office or for a survey and it asks for "Highest grade completed." Sometimes it's just a single, simple number, other times it divides things into technical versus academic versus certificate, but there's just a lot of places where someone has that data on you. Great for studies, even if it's not a clean look.
So. Educational attainment is negatively associated with mental illnesses, which is not surprising. For education, you have to show up and do something, not just have an ability, so there are a lot of ways that can go wrong: interruptions in attendance, lack of focus, conflicts with others.
The short version is that cognitive abilities all on their own seem to be correlated with mental illnesses, with the exception of bipolar disorder, and the effect is stronger for males than for females. It is a Norwegian study, measuring the cognitive abilities when they enter their mandatory year in the military at age 18 and their primary mental health diagnoses twenty years later, when such things have had an opportunity to develop, as psychotic disorders especially tend to manifest later.
So Dryden was right? "Great wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide"
ReplyDeleteOnly for BPAD. For the others, cognitive abilities seem to be somewhat protective, or at least, not associated.
ReplyDeleteOf possible importance is that Norway historically does not diagnose autism spectrum disorders as often as other places. I think that was true of Scandinavia as a whole, but it may have changed in the last decade.
I often think that the biggest correlation to mental health disorders is the availability of personnel to diagnose them. We hear that a vast percentage of young women experience mental health issues; but they belong to a culture that embraces seeking therapy. Your insurance will only pay for it if there's a diagnosis, so the culture is interested in finding one. In nations with national health schemes, they still can only bill against a diagnosis.
ReplyDeleteThat may be the issue here as well. Educational achievement exposes you to psychology, the most popular of all majors; and if you go to therapy, they'll need to find something to let them get paid to talk with you. Uneducated people are less likely to seek out a therapist, and therefore less likely to receive a diagnosis. Since people with more cognitive ability are more likely to pursue education, they're also more likely to seek therapy, and (therefore!) more likely to receive a diagnosis of some kind.