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The nature/nurture debate on the causes of mental disorder generates no end of silly controversy by proponents on both sides.
The biological reductionists act like the secret of psychiatric disorders is written in the genetic code. They are “mindless”- dismissing the crucial role of environment in how our brain develops and of psychology and social context in how it functions.
The environmental reductionists go to the opposite “brainless” extreme- argueing that a psychiatric disorder is a direct reflection of life stresses and dismissing the crucial role of biological vulnerability, particularly for the severe mental disorders.
Both sides fail to appreciate the complexity of interaction among biology, psychology, and social setting. The brain is the most complicated thing in the known universe. It contains more than 100 billion neurons (equal to the number of stars in our galaxy), each firing dozens to hundreds of times a second, and connected to each other by 240 trillion synapses. There is no way that our 20,000 genes could in any simple top/down fashion instruct the intricate wiring and firing of so many connections. The miracle is that this complex system usually works as well as it does.
Experience must play the crucial mediating role in facilitating appropriate adaptation. Neurons that fire together, wire together. It is equally silly to deny the role of biology in providing the hardware as it is to deny the role of experience in helping to shape the software.
Read full, original post: What You Need To Know About The Genetics of Mental Disorders
