Swan Tower

I don't think I ever saw that one -- can you expand on what the similarity is?

Early-onset telepathy. The plot of "Tin Man" revolves around a first-contact specialist whom the Enterprise picks up for a top-secret mission on the edge of Romulan space. He has two awkward connections with the main cast—he was a patient of Troi's years ago and Riker holds him responsible for an infamous first-contact disaster. It turns out that where most Betazoids develop their empathy with adolescence, Tam Elbrun is one of the rare cases who are telepathic from birth. Most of these children don't survive; those who do are generally not what one would call functional. There are always other people in their heads. Tam's one of the success stories and he's been in and out of institutions his entire life; his social skills are short-circuited, his shields shaky even as an adult; he specializes in first contact because the more alien the species, the more respite he has from their minds. He finds Data almost impossibly soothing to be around because there's no mental static, nothing to screen out. (I really feel this episode should be in dialogue with Ursula K. Le Guin's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" (1971) and the character of Sensor Osden, but I can't prove it.) Riker doesn't trust him: the specialist was formally cleared of all responsibility in the Ghorusda disaster, but the suspicion persists that he drifted too much into the alien mindset and lost the obligation or even the ability to communicate the Federation's side of things; forty-seven Starfleet personnel died. Nonetheless, Tam is an extraordinarily powerful telepath and his professional history is not mostly composed of massacres, so he has been sent by the Federation to make contact with what appears to be a living ship, uncrewed, derelict, in orbit around an imminent supernova. It's a story of symbiosis. There's some distraction with the Romulans to tighten the suspense, but it is really about the ship Gomtuu and the empath Tam and what happens when they meet. But I always found Tam's backstory gripping, and to the best of my knowledge this aspect of Betazoid biology was not ever delved into in the show again, so when I read the sentence "I knew I had psychics in the modern world, and I decided their powers manifested at puberty; then I decided there was a tiny minority of people with gifts so powerful, they were active from birth," I think I am interested in this world.