Animal
So carnal it's spiritual
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2013
- Messages
- 650
- MBTI Type
- SeFi
- Enneagram
- 4
[MENTION=13589]Mal12345[/MENTION] [MENTION=21197]Boogie man[/MENTION] Being a 4 doesn't mean you will be depressed. Further, being depressed (i.e. mentally ill) skews personality from the baseline of who a person is, and is thus more likely to mistype. Due to what 4's are about, a depressed person has a higher chance of mistyping as a 4.
I don't recall seeing any explicit studies on the association of enneagram types and mental illnesses, but I would be surprised if there were any statistically relevant correlations. Further, if it would be reliably possible to tease apart the warped thinking associated with mental illnesses and core personality.
I could see 4's have a higher grouping of individuals with depression. Depression as a guiding tool for determining one's enneagram type however, is not useful and shouldn't be used, so it really isn't a factor. Most of the negative health levels for all enneagram types suggest suffering from depression, and as such depression when it is used in enneagram is broad and not very type specific.
Ultimately, this is a rather wasteful discussion to try and draw explicit lines between mental illnesses and enneagram or mbti types since it's factually a moot/broad/murky point, and it largely only increases negative stereotypes.
On a personal note, I am a 4 and also traumatized. In the heart of severe trauma, I first encountered the enneagram. My eye went straight to 4 the minute I saw the back of the book.... and the short descriptions. But then, as I read more, I ended up mistyping at 5. Because my inner landscape felt "arid" due to trauma and I felt disconnected from my body and useless due to severe chronic illness that almost killed me and stripped me of my professional singing voice & music career I'd been building up. Left me speaking in a whisper and dependent on medications.
I realized 12 years later when I came back to enneagram that I wasn't a 5, and then mistyped at 3 and 8 because despite chronic illness I ended up singing lead through my whisper, reclaiming myself, working my ass off, surviving in a dangerous city etc.
I'm a 4.. I have typed that way for 3 years now and for whatever it's worth it has been verified by several experts, some of whom have studied for up to 50 years. Of course nobody is the ultimate expert, but there has literally been zero disagreement among them.
Yet I couldn't relate to the depressive, whiny descriptions of 4. I am a 4w3, proactive about claiming my identity, overcoming hardship. Triple reactive fists. The world can't take me away from me.
ANd Marilyn Manson, a 4w5, is certainly no whining lazy sadsack either.
Real depression or trauma can feel more like a 5 or 9 description.