CAMHblog

Hi June and Diana – Each of you touch on the long-standing debate about whether genes or the environment have a greater impact on the development of psychiatric disorders. You are both right to suggest that focusing on only one potential cause leaves out the opportunity to understand how these factors interact. Mental illnesses are very complex and researchers around the world have found that genes alone cannot explain how they develop, but neither can the environment alone.

The research we are working on in the Maternal Adversity, Vulnerability and Neurodevelopment (MAVAN) project is studying how the interaction of genes and environmental factors (poor nutrition, trauma or social adversity, for example) affects both normal and abnormal brain development and behaviours.

We hope this knowledge will help establish highly targeted interventions at key time points to prevent these disorders from developing.

Once again I am devistated to read leading mental illness researchers are "blaming the parents" for their children's brian diseases much like back in the day of perpetuating the myth of "Refridgerator-Mothers" in the development of ASDs. Dispicable! Don't parents have enough grief and anguish thrown at them without the medical establishment adding to it? If what they say is true, then the constant bad news, and depression dealing with the side effects of psychotropic medications in their children prescribed by medical professionals should be causing all kinds of mental illnesses in the parents, too!                
Please click on the link and read what's really going on:  http://www.nimh.nih.gov/science-news/2013/five-major-mental-disorders-share-genetic-roots.shtml 

http://bbrfoundation.org/brain-matters-discoveries/narsad-grant-funded-tms-now-found-effective-in-treating-schizophrenia

I wonder if you will be telling students that early childhood trauma leads to mental illness later in life.I hope not.

With respect, there is no scientific evidence to prove this .The creator of this myth Freud, and his "research" where he only had two subjects: Little Hans and himself. It has no validity. It is only a curiosity about Freud's unscientific method of "research",and of historical interest to sociologists.

We all have a responsibility to ensure that we don't further propagate the many unscientific belief systems of serious mental illness.Especially now that scientific brain research findings have established scientific data regarding these chronic diseases.

We cannot just ignore the science that will debunk the advertizing of some institutions claiming "that prevention works" along with false promises of recovery.

We know this is untrue. In order to prevent a disease, you have to first have some theory how it is being caused and then plan to interfere with the theoretical causal chain of events.

Students must become critically aware of these falsehoods in order to survive the voyage through diagnoses and treatment to finding the cure for these diseases.

I hope they will become the scientists we need to annihilate this cruel human disease from our lives forever.