12 Things Everyone Should Know About Mental Illness
Sex differences, genetics, social contagions, and more
This is the third post in my “12 Things Everyone Should Know” series. You can find the full collection here.
Clinical psychology is one of the central branches of psychology, and arguably the one that first sparks most people’s interest in the subject. Indeed, many laypeople think that psychology just is clinical psychology. This is probably because many ideas from clinical psychology have percolated into popular culture - everything from multiple personalities to Rorschach Inkblot Tests to lying on the therapist’s couch retrieving repressed memories about your mother.
But as appealing as these ideas may be, most have fallen out of favor with academic psychologists, who view them more as pseudoscience than as real scientific psychology. With that in mind, in this post, we’ll look at twelve of the most important but underappreciated findings from modern clinical psychology. Let’s jump in!
1. Contrary to a common stereotype, higher IQ is not associated with higher rates of mental illness. On the contrary, it’s typically associated with lower rates, as shown in the graph below. Scores above 1 indicate a higher-than-average incidence of the condition in question; scores below 1 indicate a lower-than-average incidence.
2. The sexes are not equally prone to the different psychological disorders. As the next graph shows, men are more prone to some, whereas women are more prone to others (see also this earlier post). Notice that bipolar disorder is one of the few disorders that’s about equally common in both sexes.
