I spent an hour this afternoon reading the schizophrenia chapter in Not in our genes an old book (but still very worthwhile) by the biologists Steven Rose and Richard Lewontin and the psychologist Leon Kamin. Julie Leonovs, this should probably go as a comment on your post but I wanted to make a separate post of it. I want to put a kind of devils advocate post, which superficially is opposed to yours, but I think if you read you youll see it isnt really - what follows is by the way, not what Rose was saying, but I dont really think hed have a problem with it: Schizophrenia has a genetic cause, as does swimming, talking, sleeping and watching telly - any form of human behaviour has a genetic cause, because genes are part of the biochemical system for producing proteins and form the building blocks of everything living organisms do. Of course what is meant is Does a particular genotype predispose whether someone could develop schizophrenia (I dont actually believe in schizophrenia, but bear with me) in particular circumstances. Psychiatric researchers are obsessed with this and who knows, in particular totally screwed up societies (like ours) there might be some tiny and insignificant correlation. But wait a minute. Lets try a thought experiment. Lets enter the la-la land of psychiatric research and assume that there is an illness called schizophrenia and that what uniquely causes it is a particular set of genes. (By the way a type of behaviour could be completely genetically determined but not an illness) OK - so we want to get rid of this terrible condition. Well, one way (you could argue) is some kind of gene therapy to change the aberrant genes to different configurations. I rather suspect this wouldnt work because as this illness is actually a product of a whole social system you would probably then get a different set of people with different set of predisposing genes who get schizophrenia - whatever. However, you could also try a different biological route. You could try human interaction (nothing unbiological about this - organisms interact with their biochemistries and physiologies, you know) treating the person with respect, giving them the space to be who they want to be, listening to where they are coming from, exploring, sharing, having a dialogue. And from doing that you might gain insights - political, spiritual, whatever - and a perspective on life which everybody might gain from. Well, Ive done this on several occasions - it works. People come down when they feel they are being listened to. But, just to freak out the bad guys, we could borrow their silly language and throw it back at them, instead of endless arguments about is it an illness. Just a thought. Actually, this argument may implicitly rest on a bit more genetics/biochemistry than many people know - Ill post this now, and I may post a small additional comment about that later.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 20:28:40 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015