/sci/ - Science & Math

>>11434171
>Just as with diabetes, familial history is indicative.
BUT DIABETES IS STILL CONFIRMED WITH PHYSICAL TESTS YOU STUPID FUCK

THEY DON'T JUST LOOK AT FAMILY HISTORY AND SAY "COULD BE DIABETES, YEAH WHATEVER, WE'LL SAY IT'S DIABETES" WITHOUT FUCKING CHECKING YOU STUPID FUCK

>A gene can do one thing in isolation but result in a completely different phenotype if you place it in the context of other genes, or in a different environment. This is why we haven't found a 'depression gene' or 'schizophrenia gene', and the consensus is that this search is pointless.
The search is NOT pointless, and yes it's in its early stages, but it isn't pointless. Wikipedia links to a couple studies done in the last couple years, looking for genes associated with depression.

Anyway - telling someone they have bad genes without confirming it is HIGHLY UNETHICAL. Why shit on that person's dreams? Their parent's/parents' or grandparent's/grandparents' depression, let's say (could just be one ancestor, could be a few) could have been due to perfectly understandable environmental reasons. E.g. abuse as a child, let's say. So the whole idea of chalking it all up to genes and trying to tell a patient they have bad genes WITHOUT EVIDENCE PROVING THIS is HIGHLY unethical.

The only reason the docs want to get you on the drugs is because they don't give a shit about your dreams, and why would they? And once you're on the drugs, you'll probably abandon your dreams, because the drugs make you apathetic. It's ridiculously unethical.

Thomas Szasz was a Hungarian-American psychiatrist, who wrote a famous book, "The Myth of Mental Illness".

He thought mental illnesses are not really illnesses - instead they are simply "problems in living", i.e. emotional problems, caused by the emotional stresses of modern society, with all its complexity and competition. In his words, there are "neither biological or chemical tests nor biopsy or necropsy findings for verifying DSM diagnoses" (the DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, which is the de facto standard for mental illness definitions used by American psychiatrists).

He didn't think psychiatry was useless though - he was a psychiatrist himself, and he strongly believed in psychotherapy between a consenting patient and doctor. But he strongly criticised involuntarily and coercive psychiatry, believing that it violated the rights of patients.

I agree with him a lot. The only condition I'm familiar with where I think you could say it might be a genuine illness is schizophrenia, because your risk of schizophrenia is thought to be 80% genetic, implying that physical genes are somehow causing the condition. The mechanism is of course not yet understood. As for something like depression, that's thought to only be 40% genetic, implying that 60% of your risk is outside your genetics - things like upbringing, and your life conditions. So in that case it definitely seems to me that depression is just a "problem in living". Some genes just probably make your life shitter, e.g. make you uglier or something, which in turn makes you depressed.

What do you think, /sci/?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia