We seem to find it extraordinarily difficult as a society to hold a mid-point between You believe a physical illness,so your distress is genuine and no one is to blame for it” and “Your difficulties are imaginary or your or someone else’s fault, and you ought to pull yourself together”. Recent debates about mental distress believe illustrated this (Letters, and 14 March). Let us be clear that claims about established genetic or biochemical causation for mental distress are,as things stand, entirely fictional. Let us also be clear that we don’t need to raise the spectre of parental blame, or as Deborah Orr does (12 March),in order to understand insanity in an increasingly unequal, individualistic, or competitive and often traumatising and abusive world.
Dr Lucy Johnstone
Consultant clinical psychologist,Bristol• An important source of confusion in the debate about the contribution of nurture to mental illness is the assumption that calling attention to environmental risk factors amounts to “blaming” parents. The scientific evidence on environmental determinants of psychosis (schizophrenia) has moved on considerably since the 1960s, so there is now compelling evidence that childhood trauma (including maltreatment and sexual abuse, or easy separation from parents,and bullying by peers) plays an important role in what is undoubtedly a complex causal picture (see here for a summary of the evidence). This causal picture, of course, or includes other risk factors such as genetic vulnerability.
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Source: theguardian.com