But stressful life events can trigger the condition, researchers say
Gee, you don’t say? Wow…this is in a major media news outlet. It’s from HealthDay but also appeared on Yahoo and so I suspect it’s all over the place. What is the world coming to when the major media makes the mere suggestion that, hey, maybe life circumstances screw us up, not our genes??? (read that with dripping sarcasm)
A new analysis upends a previous, highly acclaimed study that had concluded that a particular gene variation was associated with an increased risk of major depression.
The new analysis did, however, verify the portion of the earlier finding that showed more stressful life events translate into a substantially higher risk for depression.
“Mental disorders are the most complex of all diseases,” said study senior author Kathleen Ries Merikangas, a senior investigator and branch chief of genetic epidemiology research in the Intramural Research Program at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health. “We’re learning more about how genes can control the different biologic pathways in the brain but, more importantly, how that brain is wired to respond to environmental factors. We’re at the very primitive stages of knowledge.”
According to the authors of the current paper, published in the June 17 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the new findings call into question how research — especially research in the mental health field — is conducted and received.
Scientists have had an unusually tough time linking specific genes with different psychiatric illnesses, such as depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The likely reason: The genetic and environmental interactions are both more subtle and more complex than in many other diseases, said Keith A. Young, vice chair of research at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science. (rest of article)
Update: As predicted this is now being reported on WSJ and Forbes…
Most of us who read this blog know this sort of scientific evidence “proving” brain illnesses is ALL hogwash.
In my opinion it’s not so much as looking for a ‘magic bullet’ as it is continuing to place the locus of mental illness solely in the realm of biology. This approach is materialistic and myopic, and has thusfar produced nothing but theories, dead rats, and mangled brains. Also, the hubris of science does not take into account the human spirit which cannot be quantified. By permitting this kind of thought paradigm to permeate our culture we are permitting a small but powerful minority of others to define the nature of our minds and conciousness as if it had a ‘location’ that can be manipulated, or should be manipulated by ‘experts’. From my own experience, and from observations within my family tree, mental illness was/is surely related to excessive trauma that went unrecognized or ignored, or behaviors that deviated from what was socially expected.
Sorry you went ballistic at my feeble attempt to find a little humor in a very serious problem that you and I share.
I’m not posting here any longer. There’s way too much anger and way too little rational thinking.
I don’t understand? I didn’t get angry at all…what are you perceiving as my having gone ballistic??
I really didn’t understand your last comment…did you think I was being a smart ass? I was sincerely asking what you meant and I had no idea you were trying to be funny…
If I missed something obvious it may be due to my cognitive problems. Sorry you’re feeling bad.
I’m OK also, and would like to move on to another subject.
Stay tuned for the Battle of the Benzos.
what’s battle of the benzos supposed to mean?? I’m battling hard core right now…don’t know if you read my blog or not in general. I’m almost off of 3 mg of Klonopin after being on it for 15 or 20 years….and then I’ll be drug free.
Psychiatrists did not induce me to believe that bipolar ran in my “dysfunctional” family.
Nor did I grow up believing in a genetic influence. Actually, I didn’t think much about bipolar at all. Only my grandmother had it, and I knew nothing because the family had hushed it up.
(Before people start concluding that the silencing shows how my family failed to “take responsibility,” they need to consider the place and time. This was rural Alberta in the late 1930s. “Mental illness” was always hushed up.)
I started thinking about bipolar at age 21, when my mom got sick. A few years later, her sister and brother became bipolar. Then Mom and Auntie Mae finally broke the silence on my grandmother and described her behavior in her later years, and the pieces fell fully into place.
It is obvious to me that genetics played a role in the recurrence of bipolar in my relatives and myself. I formed my belief on my own, relying on common sense and reasonable deduction.
If that sounds a little chilly, I’m sorry. It’s much easier to talk about reasonable deductions than about the anguish of watching one loved one after another one fall.
And I’m very sorry to see people reject the idea of genetic influences as “hogwash,” implying that I’m advocating a simplistic “magic bullet,” and concluding that those of us who believe in a genetic influence of wanting people to “give into defeat.”
A lot of disorders run in families. One of the best-known is Huntington’s chorea, which killed Woody Guthric.
People seem able to accept the obvious with disorders like these. But “mental illness” is so heavily charged that it seems people prefer alternate explanations, no matter how far-fetched. OK, it should be heavily charged: As the one decent shrink I ever knew said of his colleagues, “They’d die of shame if they were capable of it.”
But people seem to be saying that any psychiatric notion is de facto untrue. I loathe psychiatrists, but even they have to come up with occasional idea worth examining. To believe otherwise is to do more than despise psychiatrists. It is to demonize them. That’s something I’m not prepared to do.
yeah some disorders run in families and do have a genetic link…
I tend not to think of bipolar as a disorder like diabetes—the favorite catch phrase. There is not proof of something like insulin actually missing. Drugs don’t actually replace something that’s actually supposed to be there.
If people want to take drugs I don’t question that sometimes relief is needed and wanted, but no one should be under the impression that they are helping heal anything. They may suppress symptoms but that is all.
I’ve seen too many people heal completely without drugs and they don’t generally believe they have an incurable disease that our genes dictate. It seems to me it’s those of us who do not attach to that belief who can move on. Whether it’s right or wrong doesn’t really matter in the end. It’s whether we heal or not and whether we live meaningful lives or not.
I’m certainly not assuming people who share the belief that this is all genetically determined cannot live meaningful lives though either. Please don’t think that. I simply really and truly don’t believe that and have many friends who do have meaningful lives who share your beliefs…
it is only here on this blog that I openly share my opinions…because I do think they are liberating and life changing for some of us. Others have other roads to go down and that is fine….I do not insist on my ideas in my real life…but this blog is my sanctuary and I do take a stance that I would not in another space. I believe people should do as they feel right for their lives and so I live and let live.
no one can ever know with 100% certainty who is right or wrong…perhaps none of us are. I’m okay with that.
Looking for faulty genes to explain mental illness is like reducing a complex problems to a simplistic magical bullet. Mental illness is a complex problem simply because the experts do not understand the science beyond their square. There are some simple scientific principles that can explain “mental illness”, which appear to be mere symptoms of underlying physiological abnormalities, that escapes most pundits because of narrow medical drug-oriented medicine.
For an alternative approach please read:
Silent Diseases and Mood Disorders at:
http://www.hypoglycemia.asn.au/articles/silentdiseases.html
jurplesman
Kimbriel, I’d Like to suggest you give the tenured (?) twit My URL, but given their own Ideational Goose Stepping, I’m 90% certain you’d get Flunked for it.
There’s only one argument you need to refute Genetic predispositions. People of all ages have been offing themselves for 45,000 years.
If that Behavior, which has been with humanity for 45,000 years were actually caused by incorrect linkages of chromosomes and proteins, …… then that Behavior wouldn’t have reproduced its causative Genes in sufficient numbers to remain In the Gene Pool, and people wouldn’t still be engaging in it.
Same deal with Depression. People who got too Genetically depressed to work, would have starved their incorrectly linked Genes – to death – and clean out of the Pool thousands of years ago.
mmm…I keep coming back to this…sorry…I’m so tired and wasted these days…
I do totally believe that our bodies good health determines our good mental health as well and so I’m a big proponent of diet and nutrition and have seen many expamples of so-called mental illness clear up solely as a result of changing diet and nutrition…
so I do think there is a physical element for a lot of people…not everyone, but many…
the combination of factors that will be healing for any given individual can vary greatly…
but to treat this stuff as disease or genetically predisposed in any truly irreversible way is to give into defeat as far as I can tell and I’ve simply seen way too many people, including those with family histories like yours turn everything around for them by not believing their genes and family history would determine their outcome and this was against all odds as psychiatry tried to impose these beliefs on these people…
Debby,
I want to add…since I wrote the above upon waking…I do agree with what you say…that it’s very complex and we need to keep our minds open…
but sometimes making things too complex keep us from simply taking responsibility.
We can make things change and happen by deciding that we can…of course it’s not always that simple, but sometimes it is and it has been for me…
and that’s not saying it’s been easy because that it sure as hell has not been.
“Mental disorders are the most complex of all DISEASES,” said study senior author Kathleen Ries Merikangas, a senior investigator and branch chief of genetic epidemiology research in the Intramural Research Program at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.\”
Another Genius, who presents DISORDERS as being DISEASES.
With Govt Funded misrepresentations like That steering the good ship Research, it\’s no Wonder the patients keep getting torpedoed.
\”We’re at the very primitive stages of knowledge.”
Wrong again. Psychiatric Genetics today is no more knowledgeable as to the causation of thoughts than it was in Wilhelm Wundt, Emil Kraepelin\’s or Ernst Rudin\’s days of Occultist Social Darwinism. It remains Make Work, Junk Knowledge.
Ana & I http://justana-justana.blogspot.com/2009/03/depression-genes-tests-and-bipolar.html?showComment=1238014140000 had an exchange on this topic in March.
Hi giannakali,
I don’t think there is a “bipolar gene” or a “depression gene.” The search for these oversimplifies the problem and ignores the complexity of our brains and the interplay between conditions like bipolar and “stressful life events.” Bipolar itself creates or exacerbates these stressors.
There’s so much we don’t understand. In my case, however, I find the existence of genetic influence irrefutable. My grandmother was bipolar. My mother and her brother and sister were bipolar. Before the disease struck, one of them led a tempestuous life full of stress and another had a calm and happy life. Very atypically, none of them got sick until they were well into old age.
Maybe my point is pretty simple: We need to keep our minds open and continue seeking to understand.
Debby,
behaviors are learned in families…so this sort of argument doesn’t work for me.
dysfunctional families often have more “mental illness.”
I will not argue with how you want to interpret your family history beyond that. It’s your business, but for me, that’s how I look at it.
Ah, just what I needed. I was walking home from my Genetics class today during which the teacher stated, “All traits – including behavior – are determined or influenced by genes”. She, of course, brought up schizophrenia as an example.