Your mental weakness could be your biggest career asset.
Data collected from over 400,000 American and British workers has revealed clear correlations between a person’s profession and their genetic predisposition to several psychiatric traits and disorders, including ADHD, autism, depression, schizophrenia and anxiety.
The findings suggest that these psychological quirks could influence how people choose their careers, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have said, though only to an extent.
“Neuropsychiatric disorders are both common and highly heritable, yet they remain heavily stigmatized,” Georgios Voloudakis, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.
“We were inspired to examine whether certain genetic variants that increase the risk of developing these disorders might also offer potential benefits [in these fields],” Voloudakis continued.
“In addition to looking at potential advantages, we also wanted to explore any disadvantages or barriers that individuals with a higher genetic predisposition to neuropsychiatric traits might face.”
The analysis of 20 different professional fields showed that artists and designers were the most likely to be predisposed to any mental health condition, such as anorexia, bipolar disorder, autism, schizophrenia and depression.
Some careers stood out for having just one significant correlation: Aside from the creatives, STEM professionals were most likely to be on the autism spectrum. Schizophrenia was most prevalent in community and social workers. And anorexia nervosa shows up most frequently in teachers and educators.
The ostensibly most stable jobs were found in architecture and engineering, healthcare, farming, business and finance, office administration and support, management and sales.
Meanwhile, jobs most associated with ADHD tended to require the least amount of education, revealing a potential system bias, researchers noted.
“For example, we found that some attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-related associations are significantly mediated by educational attainment—a key driver of career pathways. This implies that systemic biases in education can disproportionately affect individuals with a higher genetic predisposition for ADHD, even if they never receive an actual diagnosis,” said Voloudakis.
While the findings, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, are considered statistically significant, researchers noted that genetic markers for mental illness accounted for potentially just 0.4% of what determines someone’s career choice. Age and sex, they added, played a far more influential role.
“Even if these effects are small, because we studied so many people, we could reliably detect them,” said Voloudakis. “These findings don’t mean we can predict someone’s job based on their genetics. Rather, they highlight subtle group-level trends. On average, people with a higher PGS for certain traits might be slightly more likely to end up in certain jobs.”
“Environmental, social, and personal factors continue to play a much larger role in shaping individual outcomes than any single genetic measure.”
