Reviews

Intelligence, schizophrenia, and the corporate industry

According to a paper in this week's BMJ (p 819), better childhood mental ability predicts a longer life. Hundreds of promising sites on the web will allow you to measure your intelligence, creativity, sexuality, or emotional intelligence www.selfgrowth.com/test.html is just one of the many collections of links. I tried several of these tests: some are fun, some are annoying (I wasted at least 15 minutes of my time on one, and the test finally didn't analyse my intelligent answers), and some are predictable (usually the creativity testsclick everything that would put off an average person, then you will always get a high score). If you like such tests try the Mensa workout (www.mensa.org). It's on the home page of Mensa, a society for bright people that welcomes "people from every walk of life whose IQ is in the top 2% of the population."

I also encountered a mental health IQ test (www.mhasp.org/coping/mh_iq.html), which is, as you may imagine, a tool to create awareness of the issue of mental health. Furthermore, a higher IQ seems to protect you from schizophrenia. The source of this statement is a free encyclopaedia of mental health information (www.mentalhealth.com/book/p42-sc5.html#Head_5), but don't expect a thrilling site. It is hard to say how much of the information is grounded in the available evidence, but it is obvious that the authors took great pains to compile this website and make it accessible free of charge while refusing corporate sponsorship. Then look at one of the sites sponsored by "an unrestricted educational grant" (such as www.mhsource.com/schizophrenia). This provides almost everything you could expect from a website: a neat layout, interactivity, streaming audio and conference series slide shows. However, I would ask all doctors who enjoy this audiovisual pleasure to visit www.nofreelunch.org.

Marcus Müllner. 

BMJ marcus.muellner{at}univie.ac.at