Medicine's big new battleground: does mental illness really exist?

[antigone382]

164. I don't dispute that the bird phobia might well be genetic.

I mean, hypothetically I suppose it could be learned...in my own life, I observed at a very young age that my mother reacted to roaches with irrational horror, and I picked up that horror too. Did it come from my genes or from observing at a young age that roaches were a thing to fear? To be clear here, I'm talking about my own experience, and I'm not trying to speak for you. If your experience leads you to feel that this bird phobia comes from something innate then I have every reason to take you at your word.

But I do think that's pretty different than the cluster of self-destructive behavior that you described in your neighbors. Full disclosure, my field of study is sociology, and examining the social factors that influence peoples' behaviors, lives, and choices is what we do for a living. There is a lot of research on the roll of class disparity and cultural conditioning in addiction and crime. Again, that doesn't mean there are no genetic factors, particularly with addiction, but it seems that there's more to the story. A kid growing up in an environment of addiction may be genetically predisposed to become addicted, but at the same time, if that kid was in an environment where he or she didn't see those behaviors--and didn't suffer the horribly damaging psychological consequences of them--then it is a lot less likely that they would fall into the same pattern.

Speaking more personally, I have some trauma-related psychological issues myself. My mother has them as well, more severely than I do--which makes sense, because the traumas she suffered were far more severe than my own. There may be genes that predispose certain people to suffer more psychological harm from trauma, but if the trauma did not occur, those genes would not matter.