Looking Inside the Gifted Population Instead of Comparing It

What the research found

A century of argument about gifted people has run between two positions. One holds that exceptional intelligence brings isolation and a raised risk of depression and anxiety. The other holds that gifted children grow into unusually well-adjusted adults, and it has had the better of the evidence.

Joanie Poirier, Anne Brault-Labbé and Audrey Brassard, at the Université de Sherbrooke in Quebec, set that argument aside. Writing in Gifted Child Quarterly in 2025, they asked instead which gifted adults fare well. Their sample was 219 French-Canadian adults between 19 and 70, each identified as gifted by a psychologist or neuropsychologist qualified to do so.

Recruitment ran in 2022 through the researchers’ networks, mailing lists of non-profit organisations devoted to giftedness, and social media accounts serving gifted adults, which draws the informed and the affected. Forty percent reported being twice exceptional, gifted alongside a diagnosed condition such as ADHD, dyslexia or autism, and a third reported an IQ above the 99th percentile. Both groups are overrepresented by the authors’ own account.

Fifty-seven percent reported a diagnosed mental health condition. The number is high and it establishes very little, because the study enrolled no comparison group from the general population. The question of whether gifted adults suffer more than anyone else stands where it stood.

The design could look inside the group. Eleven possible determinants were tested against six measures: positive feeling, negative feeling, satisfaction with life, meaning in life, a sense that meaning was missing, and the quality of their connections with other people. Degree of giftedness moved none of them. An initial signal for the highly gifted vanished once the analyses were corrected for the number of comparisons run, and adults above the 99th percentile were indistinguishable from the rest on every measure and no likelier to report a diagnosis. Gender made no difference either.

Four things did track how these adults were doing. Married adults and those in civil unions reported higher life satisfaction, more positive feeling and better connection than single adults, a moderate difference and the only group comparison to survive correction. Perceived family support accompanied higher satisfaction, connection and meaning. Twice-exceptional adults were about 1.9 times as likely to report a mental health diagnosis as gifted adults without a second condition, and those earning under CAN $40,000 about 1.8 times as likely as those earning more.

The strongest association was with a judgement participants made about themselves: a rating of how far they felt they were living a life that used their intellectual potential. That rating tracked life satisfaction more closely than anything else measured, and meaning in life almost as closely, while education and income tracked neither.

What it means for you and your child

These are adults, in one Canadian province, in a study its authors call exploratory throughout, and what it offers a parent of a gifted child is indirect.

The alarm that arrives with a high score is usually about the score. A parent told that a child sits above the 99th percentile hears rarity, and rarity has long been assumed to bring difficulty with it. Among these 219 adults rarity did not. The ones at the very top of the range reported the same satisfaction, the same connection to others and the same rate of diagnosis as gifted adults nearer the threshold.

An absence of difference is not proof that no difference exists. The sample was 219 people, the effects were small or at best moderate throughout, and the correction the authors applied to guard against false positives will have suppressed some real signal along with the noise. The claim available is a modest one, that the degree of a person’s giftedness was not where this study found harm.

Two circumstances did accompany a raised rate of diagnosis. A second condition alongside the giftedness accompanied roughly double the rate of mental health diagnosis, which matches what is already known about neurodevelopmental conditions in the general population. A low income accompanied a similar increase. The design was cross-sectional, so in both cases the order of events is unknown.

Participants rated, on a five-point scale, how far they felt they were living a life that used what their minds could do, and that rating accompanied their satisfaction more closely than any qualification or salary they had obtained. Applying that to a nine-year-old goes past what the study measured, and it points somewhere plain enough. A gifted child steered towards the most prestigious available outcome may arrive at a life that looks correct from outside and feels unused from within.

What accompanied doing well in these 219 lives was marriage, family support, an income above the line and the sense of using what one has, which are the conditions that support anyone at all. For a parent who has been reading the height of the score as a warning, this study gives that reading no support, and gives you some relief.