IQ v PTSD. Should IQ tests for students be compulsory at schools?

This is an anonymous post, due to its content, a message from Europe.

IQ v PTSD. Should IQ tests for students be compulsory at schools?

I had my IQ confirmed at 142 somewhat by accident, in my fifties. I didn't consider it important to know or understand its impact, though I knew I could do things most people are not. Like, say, “the speed of learning”. I just dealt with it and the social problems that come with it. My psychologist, whom I saw only a few times for an unrelated issue at that time and had nothing to do with IQ dilemmas, put in front of me an IQ test (WAIS) one morning. I wasn't prepared, rather surprised. He supervised it to understand me better and my problem. I skipped the last question in the test after about 50 min, cause I was hungry and addicted to coffee and wanted to take off to Starbucks. He suggested I take another one later by another supervisor to see if I would cross over to the 150-plus-zone. I did not take another test, not yet, what should I do with that info. Enough is enough.

But this was revealing, and very helpful, shame I didn't do it before. I came to understand and see a number of events in my life in a much clearer light, but late; writing and sending my first letter at age 4, picking up chess fast and beating adults, didn't understand my fellow student's sense of humor at primary, reading M. Bulkakov and Gabriel Marques in my teens and laughing. The list is long. I was fairly lucky with my parents, they were ok, middle-class, and I got the love a child needs, but unlucky with siblings. Kind of bullying I didn't realize until my adult years. I never got compliments, few from my parents, more like silent love and practical teaching, more or less got through childhood without trauma. I used to play down my intellect throughout my teens and well into my adult life, perhaps naturally, to fit in. When I suggested a solution to a problem I was sometimes asked “Who told you that?”, “where did you read that?”. I didn't believe that I was fluent in Spanish (not my mother tongue) in my twenties, I thought English was my 2nd language (not my mother tongue) when it wasn't, because I was more confident with that. Late in life, I came to understand that some of my achievements are pretty good, and on a scale of 1 to 10 I reckon I'm at say, 7-8, have what I need though my life is often empty. Low self-esteem is not rare among high intellects.

I saw a psychologist 2nd time (when I took the supervised IQ test) cause of a PTSD from volunteering in a war zone in my twenties, such experience in addition to high IQ is a recipe for solitude. In the atmosphere of war one feels and realizes the senseless brutality that a human is capable of but also able to endure. It never goes away so the inevitable deal is to live with it. My teenage daughter told me I sometimes screamed in my sleep, I had no idea. But it never goes away cause part of it is like chemicals in one's brain, the body suddenly “warms up” if I'm triggered, even on a happy-go-lucky day. I don't watch war movies, unless with quality writing, which I can tell within a few minutes.

Being aware of my high IQ helped me a lot cause I understood better than before, that it was not only by the PTSD when I got triggered of by a war-related event or memory, smell or sound, that I retreated, called in sick or kept silent if I was among people. There were days in my forties when I stayed “home-alone”, unbalanced and uncanny, I even at some point got the weird-scientists-haircut. Because sharing PTSD experiences and thoughts is in some ways like dealing with high IQ, social problems, not being sure of anything sometimes, and so and so. I reckon my mother had high IQ, she was not tested but she seems to have naturally but unbeknownst to her, passed on some tools, to me her son, to survive, that is to not backbit or hate, it's a total waste of energy, to respect and consider the weak, to reach out to the poor. It's tolerance and patience that really comes handy when you're crazy. And everyone else stupid. So I even look normal to my neighbors. But then it doesn't makes sense, that I didn't figure out with my high IQ, that it's important to know or understand the impact and the downside of high IQ. Too often the loneliness is unbearable.