Mental illness and brilliance have long been associated with each other, in social belief if nothing else. The 'mad genius' is a literary trope going back centuries. A fair number of studies have focused on the high prevalence of mental illness in people with high intelligence.
Oxford scholar Robert Burton (1577-1640) wrote the first medical text on clinical depression, The Anatomy of Melancholy. Mental illnesses continue to be a major topic of research at Oxford, and I suspect that part of the large academic interest in them is because so many researchers here suffer from them. I think I know more people who have diagnosed and undiagnosed mental illnesses here than I do people who do not. And people who fall somewhere on the spectrum -- for example, they experience high anxiety and have had panic attacks, but not at a frequency that constitutes an illness. And, as these are invisible disabilities, there is no doubt in my mind that a fair few more people I know suffer from them that I don't know about.
Autism. Anxiety disorder. Bipolar disorder. Clinical depression. OCD. Tourette's. These are the most common amongst my colleagues, though a number of other illnesses affect those around me. And a top-tier, highly competitive environment breeds the sort of situations that exacerbate the symptoms of these illnesses.
The silver lining to this is that, as living with mental illnesses (your own or your friends') is such a prevalent part of everyday life here, I find my college's graduate student body* to have created, by and large, one of the most non-judgemental cultures for people with mental illnesses that I have ever encountered. I wish I could transplant that open-mindedness and sensitivity to the other places I live and travel.
*The administrative departments, however, have an infuriatingly long way to go.
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