You’re circling the real answer already, which is inconvenient for people who want a clean morality tale. The whole “smart people are stable” narrative lives in quiet suburbs; the “smart people are trainwrecks” narrative dominates culture because we only bother to remember the geniuses who combust in public.

Let’s disentangle this without pretending the universe is tidy.

1.

Famous smart people are a hilariously biased sample

You know who gets remembered?

• Writers
• Artists
• Musicians
• Philosophers
• Inventors who nearly died doing something absurd

These are exactly the neurotypes that combine:

• high intelligence
• high openness
• high emotional volatility