Genetics of mental dieases

[Hans de Vries]

Hiw many genes have so far been identified as contributing to development of depression and anxiety disorders?

[puppypower]

I don't think genes have too much to do with these. The reason is ,the DNA is assumed to be highly conservative and changes very slowly over time. If you go back even 20 years, there were not as many cases of such disorders. It can't be genetic since this rate of change is too fast to be consistent with other biological claims of genes. These have more to do with changes in culture.

 

One possibility is, back in the day, people were taught to be more self reliant. Now it is more about dependency on government, drugs, technology,or PC telling how to talk or when to get upset, etc. When one feels self reliant, one feels they have the ability to alter situations, so there is less reason to get depressed or have anxiety. If you are dependent, many more things are not under you control, so when one hits bottlenecks this can lead to depression and anxiety.

 

A good example is consider when you are doing something you are good at. This could be sports, video games, singing, etc. When you are doing that thing, you will rarely feel depressed or anxious due to a feeling of control and self reliance. The negative feeling appear when things are not under your control. If culture teaches one to be dependent, than so little is under your control and that these feelings can appear more often and will start to appear genetic. But again, genes don't change that fast.

Edited November 15, 2015 by puppypower

[overtone]

 

 

If you go back even 20 years, there were not as many cases of such disorders.

That is false.

[CharonY]

There is evidence of inheritability of certain conditions. However, there are no specific associations with specific alleles. There are various reasons, including (to my knowledge) that most likely mental disorders are complex traits that are not directly determined by genetics, but are the result of genetic and environmental aspects. I.e. even if one is genetically susceptible to certain disorders one may never actually develop it and vice versa.

Furthermore, characterization and classification of mental disorders are very complicated and similar symptoms may be related to completely different molecular/physiological/neuronal causes.

[Strange]

I don't think genes have too much to do with these.

 

 

As is often the case, what you think is wrong:

http://www.nhs.uk/news/2013/02February/Pages/Five-mental-disorders-genetic-links.aspx

[Der_Neugierige]

Äähmm...

 

 

Well äähmmm....

 

I don't believe in the most cases of depressions there is a genetic cause.

 

1. Exemple

 

Some years ago there was crime in Germany. A mother of two children was kidnapped and killed. Her husband was a banker. They appeared on TV and the husband looked very depressed. They had the hope that the mother would be alieve. Only one year later the husband commited suicide.

 

2. My father had a coworker who married a woman and bought a new house. He planned to have a family with children but then his wife gets in love with other man and wanted to divorce. This coworker commited suicide suicide by installing a bomb in his new house.

 

Depression to conect with genetics won't be successful.

Edited November 18, 2015 by Der_Neugierige

[CharonY]

Well, this is the reason why these studies cannot be based on anecdotes. There have been numerous studies that actually show that depression does show a heritable pattern. But obviously it is not purely genetic, rather (as so often) it is an interaction of environment and genetics.

It should be noted that I am talking about the extreme form of depression (Major depressive disorder) which is not necessarily what is used in regular jargon. An example is a recent study in Plos one, which found moderate genetic contributions (based on family studies, see Fernandez-Pujals et al. 2015).

 

Finding the molecular mechanism is very difficult, which is to be expected. There is some work on serotonin transporters, but again, due to the complexity of this issue, it require much more work to figure out potential mechanisms.