EBD Blog

Over on Nature News Alison Abbott has a story about some of the difficulties researchers encounter in pursuing genetic causes of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders. It’s worth a read.

Psychiatric genetics: The brains of the family

Does the difficulty in finding the genes responsible for mental illness reflect the complexity of the genetics or the poor definitions of psychiatric disorders? Alison Abbott reports.

Every family has its foibles, but this one has more than most. The first member came to researchers’ attention in 1968 as part of a genetic survey of juvenile delinquents who had been admitted to Scottish detention centres. One boy carried a major ‘translocation’, in which a chunk of chromosome 11 had been switched with part of chromosome 1.

The translocation and the boy’s bad behaviour were more than just coincidence. Years later, when Edinburgh researchers traced the family, they found that the same chromosomal abnormality spanned four generations, with remarkably varied effects. Of those who carried it, five had depression, six had schizophrenia or related disorders, three had adolescent conduct disorder and two had anxiety disorder. One had attempted suicide and died in a mental hospital. Several of those without the translocation had their own problems, including anxiety, minor depressive disorder and alcoholism.

There are plenty of good reasons to suspect a genetic component in many problems. See, for example, Irv Gottesman’s excellent work on the topic (a few references follow). But if the same genetic errors lead to different behavioral outcomes or if our typing of behavioral difficulties (e.g., “schizophrenia,” “bi-polar,” etc.) are not coherent, it will be difficult to identify relations between genetic and behavioral anomalies.

In my view, this underscores the need to get beyond interpretive classification of intra-psychic intentions in describing and categorizing Emotional and Behavioral Disorders.

Here’s a link to Ms. Abbott’s story (which I think is available for free).

Gottesman, I., & Shields, J. (1972). A polygenic theory of schizophrenia. International Journal of Mental Health, 1, 107-115.
Gottesman, I., Shields, J., & Hanson, D. R., (1982). Schizophrenia: The Epigenetic Puzzle. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gottesman, I., & Wolfgram , D. L. (1991). Schizophrenia genesis: The origins of madness. New York: W. H. Freeman.