Gilmore 167 (1): 8 -- Am J Psychiatry
<http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/167/1/8>
A snip of one person's perspective on genetics and schizophrenia
"
Currently, it is thought that genetic risk for schizophrenia emerges in
two basic ways—the first being the polygenic interaction of multiple
common variants of probably thousands of genes, each with very small
individual effects (8). The second are rare but highly penetrant genetic
events such as deletions or duplications—copy number variations (9). Of
the environmental causes of schizophrenia, most studies have focused on
pre- and perinatal environmental risk factors; three of the
gene-environment studies relevant to schizophrenia focus on
these—infection, depression/stress, and urban birth.
"
Another snip
"
In this issue, Mäki and colleagues (2) studied the interaction of
genetic risk (having a parent with schizophrenia) with an environmental
risk—that of maternal depression during pregnancy. They found that
maternal depression during pregnancy significantly increases the risk of
schizophrenia in offspring if one of the parents has a psychotic
disorder. If a child had one parent with psychosis, their risk of
schizophrenia increased 2.6 times. Maternal depression by itself did not
increase rates of schizophrenia. However, if the genetic risk of having
a parent with schizophrenia was combined with the environmental risk of
maternal depression, schizophrenia was more than 9 times more likely.
The combination of genetic risk with an environmental exposure
interacted to increase rates of schizophrenia more than that would be
expected by simply adding risk from each.
"
It's this paragraph which is most telling
"What causes schizophrenia? The short answer may be "nothing" or more
precisely "no one thing." In most cases, schizophrenia is an end result
of a complex interaction between thousands of genes and multiple
environmental risk factors—none of which on their own causes
schizophrenia. Daniel Weinberger, in his classic paper on brain
development and schizophrenia (10), entertained the "unlikely"
possibility that schizophrenia is "not the result of a discrete event or
illness process at all, but rather one end of the developmental spectrum
that for genetic and/or other reasons 0.5% of the population will fall
into." Over 20 years later, this unlikely scenario is looking more
realistic. Schizophrenia is increasingly considered a subtle
neurodevelopmental disorder of brain connectivity, of how the functional
circuits in our brains are wired. Schizophrenia may in fact be the tail
end of a distribution of how the estimated 20 billion neurons and their
trillions of synaptic connections in our brains are generated,
eliminated, and maintained. Schizophrenia may be the uniquely human
price we pay as a species for the complexity of our brain; in the end,
more or less by genetic and environmental chance, some of us get wired
for psychosis."
This means that genetic assay to remove the possibility of stopping a
baby developing schizophrenia in later life may not be possible unless
Meehl's hypothesis of schizophrenia is true, that there's a genetic
prestate necessary. Certainly one of the new emergent theories, that
schizophrenia can be caused by an HVN virus which is a very rare type of
virus encoded into the human genome, would lead credence to this
possibility however it has not been proven yet.
The problem is still the problem of pathologisation, the value of
schizophrenia, human value and the prevention of an important phenotype
being attempted to be wiped out because society pathologises it in 2011.
What I mean is these new research studies into genetics and embryo
screening make it every more possible to make Hitler's objectives
possible: the creation of a super race by extermination of those
considered to be undesirable. This may seem like an ad hominem argument
against genetic screening for behavioural and emotional disorders
however I use it to convey the magnitude of immorality of stopping
certain types of people being born. Hitler wanted to castrate the
schizophrenics. He wanted them exterminated from the gene pool. He
probably would have wanted the Jews, homosexuals and other types he
didn't like exterminated so the human gene pool could be pure, white and
Aryan. He wanted Aryans the same way the world through psychiatry wants
automotions - machine-like, ideal human beings - and so will parents who
want their offspring to have the best opportunities in a world where
inequality is increasing all the time.
Emotional and behavioural disorders (as they're know in psychiatric text
books, probably because psychiatrist know mental illnesses aren't real
illnesses) have included many 'conditions' which are no longer
conditions but not through any change in biological processes. They
stopped being illnesses because society advanced, for example by
becoming more sexually liberated (hysteria) or by considering black men
who were slaves and kept running away were in fact very sane (drapetomania).
The psychiatric paradigm, i.e. the formalisation of prejudice using
'science' (a bastardisation of science with social norms and cultural
morality), carries risks because it can be used to suppress and
subjugate normal human behaviours based on the temporary and local
values of the largest consensus group of psychiatrists. But they're not
really treating real illnesses. And so exterminating schizophrenics by
removing them from the gene pool - even if it's at the behest of parents
- is a fucking bad thing.
I know the horrors of severe mental illness first hand so I can
understand why a parent may not want their child to be a schizophrneoic,
just like a parent might want their child not to be gay a century ago.
Psychiatry has got lots of evidence that they're do worse in life.
There's also a significant evidence base to show the problem is a large
part to do with the effect of societies and local cultures.
There's a humane reason for the extinguishing of certain phenotypes
however there are strong ethical and moral reasons why types of human
beings should be made extinct. There's also the value to society. The
severely mentally ill have contributed to human civilisation in an
inordinate number of ways. They contribute across the world in different
areas just like automotons too. There's a value to their experiences and
the diversity they bring to the human race. They may be disadvantaged by
post-Industrial Age 'developed' (are developed nations really
developed?) post-capitalism societies. I a hundred years the severely
mentally ill may be valued above automotons because of society changes
to see their value and give them back their rightful place in society.
In the UK the diagnosis of bipolar has gone through a change where
people think it may be a desirable attribute (little do they know of the
hell).
So any parents who wish to condemn my opinion that no types of people
should be allowed to be made extinct ever can, frankly, taste my
chocolate salty balls. They are my adversaries but I'd still like to let
them chomp on my chocolate salty balls.
No comments:
Post a Comment