This is not a stigmatizing statement at all. tone = {sarcasm: "implied"};
Perhaps people who would feel the urge to be reclusive would be more social if people like you kept your mouths shut every once in a while and didn't say pathetically pretentious things like "us normal, social people".
Who says this?
Two strawmen battle it out to see who will become the One. True. Scotsman.
Your point seems to be that some people aren't subject to mental illnes, and that some of those people are smart, courageous, etc. Sure, and vice versa.
It's not a zero-sum game where you decide you have 12% of this quality and 73% of this one one, so that means you should be compensating for (or naturally adept at) depression by focussing 38% of your energy and intelligence on...social things or whatever.
Secondly, there is no choice in faring better in solitary confinement, whether imposed or elective, nor in social situations because people simply do what they do and follow their emotions and reasoning, for the most part. Would you say Grigori Perelman is mentally ill?
Thanks, this is going in my "keepers" file ;)
The child's treatment during formative years 0-7 will have an immense impact on whether certain predispositions (I.E. psychopathic tendencies) are expressed later in life.
Dr. James Fallon, who was part of a documentary I saw a while back, was describing how he was shocked to discover that he had the brain of a psychopath, but his life turned out very differently because (and I'm paraphrasing) "when I look back at picture albums of my childhood, I'm always seeing smiles".
Interesting. Identical twins raised separately have a correlation of .76, while fraternal twins raised together have a correlation of just .55 and non-twin siblings raised together have a correlation of .47[0]. To me that suggests a strong genetic (though not necessarily heritable) component. And perhaps the .08 difference between fraternal twins and non-twin siblings is explained by differences in the mother's nutrition.
How do you measure the effect of nutrition? What studies are you looking at?
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlations...
The bad news: beyond about a 125 IQ, it's the CCCP (courage, creativity, curiosity, passion) that actually matter as predictors of creative achievement, and those correlate slightly positively with biological mental illness[0], and very strongly with induced mental illness due to social adversity.
Society makes sure that the best people have fucked-up lives. That's well-documented. Fucked-up lives lead to mental illness. Also well-documented.