Since this is truereddit maybe I'll avoid getting referred to /r/iamverysmart for this comment.

I was a Davidson Institute Young Scholar for a number of years--the Davidson Institute being a network of and support group for "PG" (profoundly gifted) minors and their families. To be accepted you had to, among other things, score in the 99.9th percentile on an officially administered IQ test, which is anything above a 145.

It was pretty widely acknowledged within that circle that there was a level of giftedness that was good and constructive, in around the 115-150 range, and with anything above that you started seeing severe diminishing returns and all sorts of emotional problems. Sure, you had your garden variety autisms--I remember at one of the yearly gatherings we were all in a giant conference hall and I looked around and realized just how fucking stereotypical we all looked; buncha ten-year-old kids with thick glasses and their shirts tucked in--but there was also a really distressing amount of suicide and suicide attempts.

While the kids would be touring the NASA research center or listening to the keynote speaker, the parents would be off at seminars about mental and emotional health, or warning signs, or homeschooling and unschooling.

I'm pretty comfortable saying that around a third of the kids I met through that program attempted suicide--not many were successful, thankfully tweens aren't very good at killing themselves--and I can't think of any who didn't have serious, long term counseling for depression or oppositional/defiant disorder or any number of other mental issues. My sample size wasn't very large at all, but keep in mind also that these were children of involved, supportive parents. It's (by design) not a big or well publicized organization, it's not easy to get into, it's not cheap to go to a weeklong gathering in California. These were parents who, largely, got their kid into their school system's gifted and talented program, found that even that wasn't sufficient, looked for more obscure options, homeschooled their children in many cases, and they're still fucked up.

I know some of them found success, at least in a traditional sense, but I know far more who didn't. As someone who's been to weekly counseling for as long as I can remember, it's pretty disconcerting to look at pretty much the only actual group of true peers I've ever had and see how many of them end up trying to take their own lives or ending up living a life of total obscurity. Doesn't exactly inspire hope.