Bipolar Information Links

Very high IQ (like on IQ tests, my first cousin got a perfect score on his SAT, Mensa qualification) runsin my family, with the bipolar disorder, along with some practical inventiveness but no artistic creativity at all. The descendants of the Raymond ancestor who linked to my Rice and Balch lines carry a common legend that genius and madness run in the Raymond family, and from genealogies, they mean a practical sort of genius, and not artistic talent! Nothing has been written on bipolar disorder and IQ, but it seems that if a psychiatric expert said on an unidentifiable TV program about a family with a child with bipolar who taught himself several foreign languages by age three that "oh, yes, that is VERY common with manic depression", then someone definitely knows something about this. All of my Rice line families with manic depression, children taught themselves to read by age three; my grandmother did. A few bipolar families on my lists have genius level IQ's, too. Nevertheless, the articles below provide some clues. Besides, some of history's most successful and outstanding people, like Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, had bipolar disorder; it isn't uncommon in very successful people and outright hides among salesmen. Anyone who knows anything at all about this very bright/ precocious children thing with bipolar disorder, please contact me at tiggernut24@yahoo.com.

My grandmother's biography My grandmother had mild manic depression; her mother had a severe case and it ran in the family. I hadn't put this together when I wrote her biography, but all the classic symptoms of it are there! My grandmother was extremely brilliant, intense, and strong willed; her mother had severe manic depression. In 1910 Massachusetts, she went to college on scholarship, intended to become a doctor, but she had one of her periodic bouts of extremely low energy and fatigue, so she studied English literature, and stopped just short of her Masters' Thesis. She then did settlement and social work in New York State, then went as an Episcopal missionary to Appalachia, where she spent a remarkable two years in an isolated mountain community. Then she went home, married a bright young engineer, and had a family. After her second child, she became a reading tutor, because her experiences as a social worker had convinced her alot of kids' troubles resulted from they couldn't read. A firm believer in teaching reading by phonics, she both achieved reknown for working with kids with learning problems, and went to war with the local city schools over their method of teaching reading. My grandmother was a bit past over the edge in everything she did, she was ALWAYS right, and she was a stiff, cool, rigid, authoritarian, volatile and difficult parent. She ran the household on a tight schedule. My own mother, who was clinically ill, was a good deal worse.

I only left out of her biography only the bizarre panic attacks with story plots, delusions and hallucinations, that she was given to, along with a dozen odd phobias noone was allowed to forget or fail to respect. Until I started having them, I didn't know what they were. My sister, also, is an extraordinarily energetic and focused person who has managed to become a high level manager at IBM by age 35 - while so touchy she thinks anything you say to her or ask her about is a personal insult. This, too, is classic mild manic depression - everyone who hears any part of my family story goes, "aha." It is not unusual for people with manic depression or their immediate family members with milder, subclinical illness, to have stories like this. Kay Jamison, a psychiatrist and researcher severely afflicted with manic depression like her father and her sister, went to Africa to research Huntington's chorea in an isolated group that tended to have the condition there, and found the gene. Someone at my local AMI chapter mentioned this to me when I mentioned the great flock of my grandmother's mother's people who became missionaries to Africa. I said, I didn't know anything about this disease, but I could see that something was very strange with these people. Like, why?

After their common inbred ancestors, the flock of land speculator addicts who beat a trail of newly founded towns through early 17th century central Massachusetts. Nothing is striking the people knowledgeable about manic depression who I am talking to as hard to figure out about this; many people with manic depression are extremely successful salesmen, and people with manic depression often get addicted to gambling! The Rice line, descended from one of the land speculators with cyclical moods who lead whatever community he was in at the time and made fortunes at land speculation (in the unsettled forests of 17th century Massachusetts) when he cycled up, and got fed up and migrated every time he cycled down, had a number of cases of serious mental illness, and a Willard that I know of was executed at Salem in 1692 as a witch for repeated psychotic episodes, and compulsive land speculation. In semi-feudal 17th century Massachusetts, dealing in land as a fluid commodity was witchcraft, pure and simple. If he had waved a magic wand, the people around him would have UNDERSTOOD it better, and if he had conjoured Satan, they'd had been less alienated! See pages on my Raymond, Balch and Rice lines.

Sometimes people with manic depression also go in for evangelical Christianity. The condition also often hides behind alcoholism. This came up in a discussion of shared suspicions about my father's father's Dehaven and Op den Graef lines. But a member of the Nicholas and James Noyes family, of Salem infamy, married very early into the group of families that became the Rice and allied families flock of birds. This family produced severe mental illness and extremely intense people everywhere it married, and did not fail to produce large numbers of mentally ill grandchildren at Sudbury. An inbred Noyes line crossed with another Balch line (they already carried a gene for severe depression, anxiety disorders, and schizophrenia - probably a faulty dopamine receptor gene). The Noyes grandmother was as a parent an exact clone of my grandmother. An uncle went permanently "insane". The Noyes mother had severe panic attacks - the kind where she ran around the house thinking she was somewhere else. The kind that only happen with manic depression. The father was her first cousin. Another uncle was an Evangelical minister who made Rev. Noyes of Salem look sane and laid back! Two daughters had repeated "nervous breakdowns"; bouts of disabling depression or possibly mania. A third daughter, in turn of the century Boston, an extremely intense, brilliant and lively woman with a poor self image who never married, became an economics professor, got involved in the international peace movement, and won a Nobel Peace Prize! She was my grandmother's fifth cousin, or something.

* Kay Jamison's comment on bipolar emotionality

http://frostbite.umd.edu/~cass/text/mania.html

http://home.i1.net/~juli//bipolar.html"

* serendipia_Preti page.

http://w3.wo.sbc.edu/pr/hedrick98/manic-artists/index.html

* http://www.schizophrenia.com/ami/cnsmr/creative.html

* Mood disorders, ADD and creativity

ADD personality types and intelligence

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/malcolmi/creatvty.htm

http://www.oocities.org/HotSprings/2757/CREATSGL.htm

http://www.frii.com/~parrot/living.html

http://www.frii.com/~parrot/dead.html