Nature vs Nurture

[titanic]

IV2010, whilst I hear what you are saying and its tragic to hear of the suicides in your family. We cannot get away from the fact that suicide is still a choice / a decision. When you say 'it runs in families' it is the behaviour that runs in families. No gene has been found for schizophrenia, which is on the top end of the spectrum of mental disorders. I wonder how much of it is reactional / learnt behaviour. You could argue that alcoholism runs in families, but where is the alcohol gene? There are so many other factors involved.

[alfiealvins]

Debate on physical care is one of the oldest questions in psychology. Discussion focuses on the proportion of genetic and environmental factors in human development. Some philosophers, like Plato and Descartes proposed that some things are innate, or that simply occurs naturally in the environment without caring about the consequences. Other well-known thinkers like John Locke believed in the tabula rasa, which suggests that the mind begins with a tabula rasa. According to this concept, all that we and all our knowledge depends on experience.For example, when a person achieves tremendous academic success, did they do so because they are genetically predisposed to be successful or is it a result of an enriched environment? Today, the majority of experts believe that behavior and development are influenced by both nature and nurture. However, the issue still rages on in many areas such as in the debate on the origins of homosexuality and influences on intelligence.

[Underground]

IV2010, whilst I hear what you are saying and its tragic to hear of the suicides in your family. We cannot get away from the fact that suicide is still a choice / a decision. When you say 'it runs in families' it is the behaviour that runs in families. No gene has been found for schizophrenia, which is on the top end of the spectrum of mental disorders. I wonder how much of it is reactional / learnt behaviour. You could argue that alcoholism runs in families, but where is the alcohol gene? There are so many other factors involved.

High-end mental disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder do run in families, though. Or so I've noticed. I don't know many schizos/bipolars, but I always notice that either a parent or grandparent has the condition as well.

As for depression, I believe it's more environmental than genetic/chemical, though.

[me, myself and i]

On a slighty different note, im adopted, i was, am, and never have been anything like my "parents"
Im a firm believer in nature not nurture.
Saying that, i want to nurture my own children as they grow.
Go figure, i sure as hell cant.

[HawthornePassage]

Here's my perspective on this:

Mental disorders are not 'genetic diseases' that have 'genetic susceptibility' per say. But in a way, the whole 'susceptibility' thing is true because I do believe that some aspects of our personality characteristics are inherited.

Shit snowballs. In twisted and fucked up ways. I think this is something that a lot of people don't realize...its too complicated and 'under the radar' (subtle would be the word) for most people to pick up since the vast majority embrace linear thinking patterns. This includes when looking at them selves. They see the end point, lets call it point Z. And they might see the beginning point, point A (but often mis-attribute the cause). However, they don't see B, C, F and all the other letters with the mess of lines connecting to each other in elaborate ways. So naturally, they substitute a simple explanation and its taken for granted. This is actually MORE true with many 'hard scientists' who have a fundamental lack of 'non linear thinking' due to their education style.

It's taken for granted for several reasons:

1) People want to believe we live in a 'really advanced' society
2) People don't question science

The two are inter-related to an extent. Our level of science, while very mature for 'harder' sciences like chemistry or physics, isn't sufficient for 'grey' or 'subjective' areas like psychiatry. There are simply too many confounding variables and possible explanations for the same result. Not to mention conflict of interest; most psych research is funded by big pharma. Even a legitimately positive result may have a different and far more complex cause/answer than is suspected. The people conducting these studies are trying to use 'Occam's razor' which is a useful tool when dealing with the easily explainable. But it was never intended to oversimplify something that is inherently complex; doing so is a huge misuse of it but our scientific community naturally disagrees due to linear thinking. People may be predictable in their basic behavior patterns, but their inner workings are often like mazes.

The other part, of course, is that there's a strong need in the West (particularly the United States) to feel that the world is 'good'. This automatically makes people assume (especially when added to the scientific dogma) that the results are correct. This is why I believe that while its theoretically possible to explain mental disorders scientifically as we are fully biological organisms barring some divine element, there are too many confounding variables for it to be practical for a long long time. Furthermore, a more 'empathy' and 'understanding' and 'changing our social environment' based treatment model is infinitely more effective and can stop or slow them from developing earlier on. But society doesn't like that...people want to feel like the world/society is okay (aka not part of the problem) and thus you have the 'blame the individual' model of so called treatment. This also influences the conclusions that researchers come to. Early researchers embraced this 'blame the person' model all the way back into the 1800s when there was little more than opinion to go off of. No surprise at all that things are not much different now, albeit complete with a (much bigger) house of cards.



I'll illustrate an example: There is purportedly a genetic locus for 'schizophrenia'. Notwithstanding the flaws in these studies, lets assume that there really is.

Questions that need to be asked and reliably answered before drawing ANY kind of remotely scientific conclusion:

1) What is Schizophrenia? It's a condition diagnosed in a methodological but still somewhat subjective manner based on accounts or observations of behavior. No 'blood test' can find it.

2) What are the susceptibility factors for such a condition? What 'confounding' factors/similarities in social environment do schizophrenics have in common? (it has been hypothesized that years long stays in lonely hospital environments combined with large doses of powerful drugs may actually worsen the disorder itself, even though the drugs do mask the symptoms)

3) What do such 'genetic similarities' actually code for? While we have mapped the human genome, our understanding of what many genes actually *do* in practice is very poor.

4) What personality factors do these people have in common?

5) Do certain personality factors cause someone to be more likely to react a certain way to terribly negative situations?

6) Are these personality factors intrinsically negative? If not, how can one say that a disorder has a 'genetic basis'? This is technically accurate but implies that someone has 'genetic flaws'. If creative/abstract people are more likely to go 'insane' or get depressed under ten tons of mental pressure, why blame their creative nature? Blame then ten tons of mental pressure instead?

7) Or even, if people are more likely to have an adverse reaction to what many would consider 'normal life' because of those attributes, are those attributes bad? Generally we would consider creativity and emotional sensitivity to the environment to be 'positive attributes'. This could apply to ANY mental disorder that has a claimed 'heritability'.

8) What does this say about the environment itself?

9) Are there reasons why this method of examination is not commonly used?

10) To what extent are basic personality characteristics heritable/affected by infant environment, and to what extent do they genetically vary?

Simply getting a correlation, especially with conflict of interest, does not even remotely hint at a 'genetic basis for a disorder'. This is true even if sufferers of certain major disorders share some genetic characteristics that others do not. This also in no way minimizes the massive impact these issues have on people, even if they cannot be literally and scientifically classified as 'pathologies'. Doing so actually takes away from understanding the true nature of the problem.

the truth is that we know dick squat about supposed 'genetic links' to mental disorders. our current level of research yields little more than hitting a defective computer with a hammer and saying... "Hey, there are circuit boards inside. The problems are linked to the circuit boards!"

Nature vs nurture...I don't know. I think humans are hard wired a lot more than we generally like to think in some ways, which dictates our responses to the environment at hand. But do you blame the environment which incites the reaction, or the wiring itself? I firmly believe that our current environment is toxic to many people with positive attributes that are ill adapted to our current society. Since the toxic environment is the problem, I say we focus on that as much as possible. Then, once the most creative and sensitive people are happy and prosper in the world....then we can worry about genetics.

[j1a1i1smit]

i don't see one. i believe that people who have genetically transmitted conditions should decide if they think they're so wonderful that the risk of subjecting another life to their afflictions is worth satisfying their ego. i have scoliosis and clinical depression both of which are suspected of a genetic component and i will never reproduce. adoption is a much more satisfying use of any parenting skills a person may have.