On IQ: I made straight A's as a child up until high school and was miserable. I took the IQ test with my psychologist at 13 and made a 121. That's above average for an adult, so I was considered smart.
I was very unhappy at this time, as I could not relate to any of the people around me who seemed very unintelligent and belittling. Their rude comments made no logical sense, but they still hurt. I didn't know how to present myself to them, so I just cried every day and went off by myself. My parents organized summer day camps for me to attend, but other than that, I never left the house. I didn't have any friends, so I never talked on the phone. I watched some of the anime they were showing on Cartoon Network at the time, and pressured my parents into getting a computer and the internet. This was my time closest to being what is known as a hikkikomori, I think.
It wasn't until high school, when I met some people by chance at a local geek store and was thereby peer-pressured into joining their anime club that I started to be happy. I stopped trying to get good grades, as I realized how stupid the educational system is in the first place, and just hung out with the club members all the time. I was happy for the first time in my life.
If IQ is a measure of how smart a person is, I think it may also be a measure of one's potential for unhappiness... That is because the majority of the world is not going to have a high IQ. Somehow, most of the people in the anime club were very intelligent and the ones that weren't were very loud and engaging, so even one like myself could relate to them.
On suicide: When I was little and I heard that suicide was illegal, I thought this was very stupid. "If someone wants to die, then why stop them from doing it?" My mother told me that it is illegal for the same reason that people hold funerals. Funerals are not held for the dead. What do the dead care what we do with their bodies after they are gone? Funerals are for the people left behind in the wake of that person's death. If someone kills themselves, they've made it necessary for a funeral to be held. They've made it necessary for their parents and friends to mourn their loss. Suicide only spreads around the pain one feels as an individual and diverts it to all the people who loved that person.
Moreover, then there are all the people that person might have met one day, had they kept living. They might have saved someone's life one day. They might have become friends with someone else who was thinking about suicide, and that might have been what saved them from doing the same thing. In that way, suicide might be considered preventative of growth in society, which is why society makes suicide illegal.
I thought of it often when I was younger... I wanted to step in front of the trolley bus as it passed. It'd be a big death that everyone noticed. This was my selfishness -- that kind of a death would cause problems for many people! Not only loved ones, but those who had to see my mangled body, those who had to clean it up, the trolley company, who would probably be sued, etc. Suicide is really selfish. I know that now.