The results turned out to be quite promising.
Having just turned eight years-old earlier this month, my son scored high enough that he met the criteria to be considered intellectually gifted with a strong proclivity for both mathematics and reading comprehension.
As a parent, this is one of those things I'm supposed to take a measure of pride in, and don't get me wrong, I absolutely do. My son is an amazing human being and I've had friends who've told me that, "He gets a lot of that from you."
But does he?
On some level, being theoretically half of his genetic blueprint, I guess that's possible. When I was his age, I too was considered intellectually gifted to the point where I was put in a similar program that my elementary school called Enrichment. Unfortunately, I didn't last long in it because that was about the same time that outside influences, namely a rapidly-deteriorating home situation thanks to my step-father's abuse and my mother's denial of reality, impacted how I functioned in school.
Now I, like virtually everyone else on this rock, never likes to think they're not intelligent. In fact, there's a great social and cultural stigma surrounding intellect and our ability to both learn and function as human beings, considering we pride ourselves as the top of the evolutionary food chain.
We look at those who suffer from ailments which affect the brain, many from the time we're born and despite our sympathetic tendencies, there is almost a universal acknowledgment that they are somehow defective people and are therefore, by albeit biased and prejudicial metrics...not really people at all.
If there's one thing I've noticed a definitive shift in since my Depression evolved in 2011, it's that from an intellectual standpoint, and this is going to sound a bit harsh but it's the only way I can accurately describe it, I can't help but feel like I've somehow become...dumber.
Someone I knew mentioned a New York Times article yesterday about an urban dispute between a resident and one of her neighbors...who happened to run a Dominatrix school out on the same block. Their opinion of the article was that it represented "surface-level repetitive hearsay," which is a pretty damning conclusion, to be sure.
Reading the article myself, however, I wasn't seeing much of the same context. Granted, I realize that no two people ever share the exact same opinions on anything. But what concerned me was that my critical eye seems to have developed a cataract or glaucoma, and I couldn't process the information the same way that I used to a decade ago when my vision felt clearer.
The same goes for even simple or repetitive tasks. Where I used to be able to go through them without having to expend much mental energy, nowadays almost everything feels like a constant uphill slog just to get them done.
While I was still living in New England and participating in clinical trials for Depression treatments at Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the things I was both screened and tested for was how my cognitive functions might have been impacted since my mental illness escalated. Along the way, I also discovered an article published in 2016 by the Harvard Medical School, that talked about how Clinical Depression can negatively impact how we think.
"...depression can actually change your ability to think. It can impair your attention and memory, as well as your information processing and decision-making skills. It can also lower your cognitive flexibility (the ability to adapt your goals and strategies to changing situations) and executive functioning (the ability to take all the steps to get something done)."
To be fair, one article does not a formal diagnosis make. But what alarms me is that the older I get and the longer I live with my Depression as it's currently constituted, the more I'm seeing little markers here and there of my brain's inability to process and function like it did before I had my breakdown eight years ago.
It definitely feels like part of why reading has become more difficult than it used to be, even though my eyesight hasn't changed at all. Same goes for both short and long-term memory recall and being able to follow orders of operations. Even the creative side has become more of a consistent uphill climb. Whereas I could sit down and churn out a couple of thousand words a day with little effort or difficulty, nowadays, it's a good day if I can find even two hundred or so.
When it comes to Depression, we tend to look only at the emotional impact it can have on the human mind. It makes sense, considering part of how we diagnose it in the first place is determining a lack of serotonin and/or dopamine in the brain. Both of which are key neurotransmitters that allow us to feel happy.
But to think that it can also attack and debilitate your mind to the point where you're potentially not as smart as you used to be...?
I'd like to think that I'm not an unintelligent human being and I've proven that many times in my life. Most recently when I completed my education about a year before my breakdown. I know I have the capacity to be able to do all the things I used to, but now they feel harder to execute than they did.
Some of that could be part of getting older, yes, but it's hard not to think that the toll this whole process has taken on me isn't also affecting my intellect, as well as my emotions.
And that is a damn scary thought.
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