I found this to be interesting.

I did okay with math up to about sixth grade. Then I had geometry one semester and my math just declined all the way to adulthood. I found geometry to be like trying to think in mud. The cylinders in my head just wouldn't hit. It was profoundly different than rote fact memorization or creative writing or spelling. I had not run into a weakness in my scholastic aptitude, until geometry. I watched almost everyone in my class perform better than me. It was one of the most frustrating classes I have ever taken.

Then I got diagnosed with schizoaffective a few years later, at the beginning of my freshman year in HS. We had chemistry math. At the time, I was on massive, hugely sedating doses of neuroleptics and lithium and I practically slept through class all day due to the psych meds. By the end of the semester I had flunked the entire course. All I can remember about it was something about ionic bonding and covalent relationships. That's it.

Nobody in my treatment team at the time realized that my slide was due to being asleep on psych meds half the time. They weren't there in class with me, so how would they? Later that year, I discontinued the drugs myself during a remission and I got put back in remedial math where, with my cognitive faculties unchained, I smoked through basic and advanced algebra effortlessly.

Here is an interesting thing, algebra is partly about symbols and variables and their relationships. In that, algebra resembles a foreign language, which also has symbols and variables with defined meanings and relationships. I have always done extremely well in any language class I have ever taken, no matter romance language, Slavic or Asian.

Language to me is just a kind of algebra. Everyone has a word for hello, you just have to learn what it is in their tongue. Computer programming is also a language with variables and for my remedial class finals project, I wrote programs by hand in BASIC, which I taught myself out of books and by reverse engineering other programs using hexadecimal editing software. So my teachers didn't know what to make of my math skills. On the one hand, algebra was cake, on the other, I couldn't prove an isosceles triangle to save myself and had just failed an entire of semester of the college prep math at the beginning of the year.

What I do find a little disturbing about the study is the wording used, such as 'cognitive deficient' in regards to teens with bipolar who weren't doing so well in math.
The authors of the article make it sound like we are organically defective or something. What the study does not reveal, is the gifts we mathematically challenged people received as compensation for not having math aptitude.

In my case, I am an artist and musician, like my mother. I also do movement arts, like martial arts and Feldenkrais. I taught myself how to read music (another language) as a child, and I played flute in the school band. I wrecked the other kids in spelling bees back then. When I was in school, I had such a natural ear for languages, that when I took first year Spanish, the teacher who was from Spain told me I had a natural Catalan accent. It happened again later when I studied Russian. The teacher, who grew up in the former Soviet Union, asked me how I had picked up a Ukrainian accent.

It's great if you are good at math. It's also okay to not be good at math. It's okay if your brain was not genetically and neuroanatomically wired for math proficiency. If so, it's likely your brain was neuroanatomically wired for other abilities. You just have to find what they are, and realize them to be so.

I am just a heavily right-brained person who is high on the creative expressive, language, and emotional intelligence scales. I am very intuitive, always have been. I can reliably spot an unhappy or angry or anxious face out of a crowd of people at a distance, almost instantly. I found the solution to being so right-brained was to marry someone who is a math genius and extremely left-brained who does all my math (from taxes to restaurant tipping) for me.