Neurodiversity and Elite Institutions
Outperformance in highly competitive exams is positively correlated with neurodiversity
As the more perceptive of you would have noticed by now, I’ve started a new company called Babbage Insight. I’ve converted one of my other newsletters into a “work newsletter” where I’m building in public.
Once I announced my startup, I got added to a WhatsApp group for IIT Madras Entrepreneurs. Over the last couple of days, we have been discussing mental health a fair bit on that group, driven by the suicide of IITM and IIM Calcutta alumnus, and McKinsey junior associate, Saurabh Laddha.
I started writing publicly about mental health in 2012. A few months after that, I got diagnosed with ADHD. In a lot of my affiliation groups, I’m among the first few people to go public about my mental health. One consequence of that is that I have people coming to me asking for advice on mental health, either for themselves or for their family members.
My wife sometimes jokes that I should set up a reseller arrangement with my psychiatrist - given the number of people who ask me for psychiatrist references (and I only know a handful). I know at least 2-3 friends who have taken my recommendation to see my psychiatrist (“my” is a bit of a stretch here - I last consulted with her last August).
My wife also sometimes jokes that I should take this newsletter paid, but that is a discussion for another day.
In any case, after I started this newsletter (almost exactly a year ago, I think), the number of friends and acquaintances contacting me to talk about mental health and neurodiversity has gone up. And this might reflect my own networks, but a very very large majority of these people are from the elite colleges that I attended.
To give some context for my non-Indian readers (of whom I think I have quite a few) - both the colleges I went to (undergrad and business school) are highly competitive, with the entry being a function of how you perform in highly competitive entrance exams where only the far right tail of the distribution to get admission. From what I remember, in one of those exams, in my year, only about 2000 out of the 130,000 people who wrote the entrance exam got admission.
Outperformance in highly competitive exams is positively correlated with neurodiversity
(I happened to be rather good at these particular entrance exams, nearly topping in them to enter comfortably. In both the schools, though, I graduated closer to the middle of the class)
Here is my controversial hypothesis - outperformance in these highly competitive entrance exams is positively correlated with neurodiversity.
Despite being a data guy, I have absolutely no way to validate this hypothesis, and in fact I’m making this hypothesis based on anecdotes. One set of anecdotes are based on the people who have been contacting me over the last few years, with mental health issues in themselves or in their children (most forms of neurodiversity run in the genes, though as Gabor Mate writes, environmental factors in early childhood also play a role).
Another is my own class at IIT Madras (undergrad), which has been hit rather hard with mental illness. Two suicides, one dropout, one person who abruptly dropped a year, 2-3 people who inexplicably started failing courses; and I’m not even counting the mild cases, such as myself. And all of this in a class of ~35, who studied what was then the most sought-after course in a highly sought after college.
Then there is the exam itself - it’s an incredibly hard and competitive exam, requiring years of preparation. Some schools are infamously known to make children prepare EIGHT years for these exams (I only prepared for one year - couldn’t have held my focus for longer). All I’m saying is that the ability to hyperfocus is a huge bonus if you are writing these exams, and neurodiverse people are better placed there.
So my claim is by no means statistical, but I have enough reason to believe (and possibly convince you) that people at elite institutions with admissions through highly competitive entrance exams are more likely to be high-functioning neurodiverse than the general population.
What this implies is that students at such elite institutions are more likely to be susceptible to mental illness than the general population. And that is before you even start factoring the extreme competition and pressure to perform within these institutions.
Suicides by students at IITs have been in the news for a few years now. I had met a professor from IIT Madras last year, and the first 10-15 minutes of our conversation centred around suicides by students on campus. This issue is real (and also, as Malcolm Gladwell argues in The Tipping Point, contagious - once you see news of other suicides, the probability of someone deciding to commit suicide goes up).
It’s outside my pay grade to propose any solutions for this, so I’ll leave it here. All I’ll say is that the faculty and management at elite institutions need to do more to protect the mental health
Additional reading
Back in 2012, on my personal blog, I had written about this.
Last year, Baal (my classmate and close friend from IIT Madras, who lives on IIT Bombay campus now), weighed in on the topic.
No matter how many top-down policies are enforced, the only protection a student has in this matter is his family and company. Unfortunately, family which has been the backbone support till 12th no longer is available and that is where the trouble starts. Undergrad is that awkward age where one is not yet an adult, but the world expects them to behave like one. Friendship is also a lottery ticket due to the above said martingale nature of grades.
I strongly believe that there is a need for a "Life School" starting at 17/18 when we are most susceptible to such episodes because we get thrown into adulthood without any skills to cope with it in a healthy manner.