Brain Imaging Results Biased by Lack of Representative Data

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What does "normal" brain development throughout childhood look like? It may depend on your demographics.

Researchers Develop New Model for Understanding Depression

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Acknowledging that current depression treatments are failing many people, researchers from Michigan State and MIT have developed a new model for understanding how multiple psychological, biological, social and environmental factors contribute to depression.

Disease Theory of ‘Mental Illness’ Tied To Pessimism About Recovery

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Researchers recently completed a first of its kind, large-scale international survey of attitudes about mental health and they were surprised by the results. According to their analysis published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders, people in developed countries, like the United States, are more likely to assume that ‘mental illnesses’ are similar to physical illnesses and biological or genetic in origin, but they are also much less likely to think that individuals can overcome these challenges and recover

The Latest News from Twin Research: The Genetic Influence on Political Voting Choices is...

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There seems to be no end to illogical and even comical “findings” from MZ-DZ twin method comparisons, where the original twin researchers argue that the greater behavioral resemblance of reared-together MZ (monozygotic, identical) versus same-sex DZ (dizygotic, fraternal) twin pairs demonstrates the “heritability” of the behavioral characteristic in question. Among these we find a twin study whose authors concluded in favor of a genetic basis for being a “born again Christian” (65% heritability), another that found important genetic influences on tea and coffee drinking preferences, and still another that found that the heritability of “loneliness in adults” is 48%.

NIMH Funding Changes Threaten Psychotherapy Research

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The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is increasingly shifting its research emphasis toward attempting to uncover biomarkers for “mental diseases,” which may have dramatic consequences for research and training in clinical psychology. In an article to be published in next month’s Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, Marvin Goldfried outlines how the shift in funding priorities for psychological research is tied to the needs of pharmaceutical companies and the biological model in psychiatry.

The Deeper Genome: New Research Findings in Genomics and Epigenomics

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In our field, there is a significant “missing heritability” between rates of “schizophrenia” in monozygotic twins and the combined reduced influence of genetic variants identified in genome-wide association studies (GWAS). The 80% figure often given as a heritability factor is somewhat misleading for students in our field who do not know how the H2 statistic is derived and various ways of deriving it. Through extensive molecular biological research of the most recent studies on monozygotic twins I have derived a theory which will make a much stronger case for socioenvironmental influences on what was previously though of in classically genetic terms.

Ernst Rüdin’s Unpublished Family Study of “Manic-Depressive Insanity” and the Genetics of Bipolar Disorder

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Although it is axiomatic in psychiatry that genetic factors are involved in bipolar disorder (manic-depression), and that they play a predominant role, there currently exists little if any scientifically acceptable evidence that bipolar disorder and other “affective disorders” are caused by disordered genes. Given almost 50 years of gene discovery claims that were not confirmed by replication attempts, we must assume by default that current gene finding claims are false-positive results as well. In the 1920s, pioneering psychiatric geneticist Ernst Rüdin decided against publishing his large family study of “manic-depressive insanity,” most likely because the results did not fit his theories of Mendelian inheritance, and failed to support his advocacy of eugenic policies.

Biology and Genetics are Irrelevant Once True Causes are Recognized

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The psychiatric genetics literature contains few references to specific environmental factors that cause psychiatric disorders, and while researchers acknowledge a role for these factors, they usually claim that environmental causes are mysterious or unknown. As a leading group of psychiatric genetic researchers recently put it, while claiming that schizophrenia “has a substantial genetic contribution,” the “underlying causes and pathogenesis of the disorder remains unknown.” But research suggests otherwise.

DSM-5’s “Speculative” 2002 Diagnostic System Based On Expected Gene Findings

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According to a leading group of psychiatric genetic researchers, writing in 1999, “From the perspective of psychiatric genetics, the Human Genome Project is an immense factory producing and refining the tools we will need to discover the genes that cause mental illness.” A 2002 “speculative outline” by a group helping to revise the DSM envisioned a future DSM-5 practice of classifying disorders on the basis of "the patient’s genotype, identifying symptom- or disease-related genes, resiliency genes, and genes related to therapeutic responses and side effects to specific psychotropic drugs.” A dozen or so years ago, at least some of the DSM-5 architects believed that genes would at long last be identified and would be integrated into the next version of the DSM. As we know, this did not happen.

Genetics of Bipolar Disorder

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Research from the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at USC finds that "The standard concept of genetic testing includes at least three...

The Latest Gene Finding Claim in Psychiatry

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On February 28th, the New York Times reported the latest psychiatric disorder “gene finding” claim in an article entitled “5 Disorders Share Genetic Risk Factors, Study Shows,” The Times reporter described a study that claimed to have identified shared genes associated with five psychiatric disorders: autism spectrum disorder, attention/deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, and schizophrenia. We have seen thousands of such claims in psychiatry since the 1960s, and we have also seen that these claims do not survive replication attempts.

Genetic Protection Against Schizophrenia?

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On November 12, 2013, Molecular Psychiatry published online Evidence That Duplications of 22q11.2 Protect Against Schizophrenia, by Rees et al. The print version was published last month – January 2014. The idea of a genetic mutation that would protect one from schizophrenia aroused a good deal of interest and enthusiasm. The paper has added some impetus to psychiatry's claim that the condition known as schizophrenia is a genetic disease. For this reason, I thought it might be helpful to take a closer look at the study.

Researcher Urges Caution When Applying Genetics to Psychiatry

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In a review editorial for the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, neurobiology researcher Steven Dubovsky from the University at Buffalo argues against the adoption of...

Genetic Research in Psychiatry: A Brief Update

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If molecular genetic research had actually delivered the genes for psychiatric disorders promised by mainstream psychiatry and its subfield of psychiatric genetics, twin research today would be largely obsolete because focus would have shifted to molecular genetic research, and a person’s genotype and diagnosis would be determined directly from his or her DNA. Twin research, therefore, retains its current level of importance in psychiatry only because the genes believed to exist for its disorders, based largely on genetic interpretations of twin studies, have not been found.

The Genetics of Depression: “Look to the Environment”

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A comprehensive review of research on the genetics of depression up to 2012, published online today by Psychological Bulletin, finds "a continued lack of...

Search for Schizophrenia Gene Marches On

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In a study released June 6, 2012 through the online journal Behavioral and Brain Functions, researchers from Japan acknowledge that "the results of association...

“Nature and Nurture: Human Brains Evolved to be More Responsive to Environmental Influences”

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"We found that the anatomy of the chimpanzee brain is more strongly controlled by genes than that of human brains, suggesting that the human brain is extensively shaped by its environment no matter its genetics," said Aida Gómez-Robles, postdoctoral scientist at the GW Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology and lead author on the paper. "So while genetics determined human and chimpanzee brain size, it isn't as much of a factor for human cerebral organization as it is for chimpanzees."

Child Abuse/Psychosis Link Not Genetic

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Although psychosis is more common in the parents of people with psychosis than those without, the difference cannot be attributed to genetics, research from...

“The Search for Schizophrenia Genes”

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MIA contributor Jonathan Leo, writing for Slate, weighs in on the research that claims to have discovered a genetic basis for schizophrenia. “We now...

Higher Genetic Risk for Schizophrenia Linked to Lower Risk of Psychotic Experiences

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Research from the universities of Cardiff, Cambridge and Bristol finds no evidence of a link between genetic associations with schizophrenia and adolescent psychotic experiences....

From Phrenology to Brain Scans: How Shaky Neuroscience has Influenced Courts

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In “When Phrenology Was Used in Court,” Geoffrey S. Holtzman writes for Slate about the spurious use of brain science in legal cases. In the 1800’s the “science of phrenology” promised to reveal criminal psychological traits by measuring the skull and today defense teams still employ neurogenetic explanations for their client’s violent behavior.

Familial Factors Affect Depression, BD, OCD, PD, and Phobias

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A study of 566 families with 1416 bipolar-disordered members, and 675 families with 1726 depressed members by researchers from Johns Hopkins and the University...

Effects of Stress Can Cross Generations

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Researchers from the University of Cambridge have found, for the first time, that genes affected by stress during life can be passed to the...