Genes 2 Brains 2 Mind 2 Me

Just a pointer to a great book – The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield.  Its an in-depth treatment on the many reasons and contexts in which we – quite naturally – feel sad and depressed and the way in which diagnostic criteria can distort the gray area between normal sadness and a psychiatric disorder.  I really enjoyed the developmental perspective on the natural advantages of negative emotions in childhood (a signal to attract caregivers) as well as the detailed evolution of the DSM diagnostic criteria.  The main gist of the book is that much of what psychiatrists treat as emotional disorders are more likely just the natural responses to the normal ups and downs of life – not disorders at all.  A case for American consumers as pill-popping suckers to medical-pharma-marketing overreach (here’s a related post on this overreach notion pointing to the work of David Healy).

Reading the book makes me feel liberated from the medical labels that are all too readily slapped on healthy people.  There is much that is healthy about sadness and many reasons and contexts in which its quite natural.  From now on, instead of trying to escape from, or rid myself of sadness, I will embrace it and let myself feel it and work through it.  Who knows, maybe this is a good first step in a healthy coping process.

If depressed emotional states are more a part of the normal range of emotions (rather than separate disordered states) then does this allow us to make predictions about the underlying genetic bases for these states?    Perhaps not.   However, on page 172, the authors apply their critical view to the highly cited Caspi et al., article (showing that 5HTT genotype interacts with life stress in the presentation of depressive illness – critiqued here).  They note that the incidence of depression at 17% in the sample is much too high – most certainly capturing a lot of normal sadness.  Hence, the prevalent short allele in the 5HTT promoter might be better thought of as a factor that underlies how healthy people respond to social stress – rather than as a drug target or risk factor for psychiatric illness.