 Much to the dismay of some of my colleagues and students, I am a voracious reader of crime novels. I have always contended that good fiction writers, if they are to produce anything like a quality yarn, must do an inordinate lot of research into particular subjects that pertain to their story. So I combine reading entertainment along with a sort of osmotic absorption of the researched information that lends the novel substance. And of course, it wouldn’t be a secret to you that I am drawn to those novels that are labeled ‘psychological thrillers.’ Early in the Beat Depression the Drug Free Way book, I quoted from Robotham’s novel, Shatter, but here’s another passage that piqued my interest ...
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Although to most psychologists and affectologists, this passage is preaching to the converted, it serves us well to understand that it is an easy ‘way out’ for most people to blame genetics and hereditary traits for mental or psychological maladaptions like depression, bipolar, neuroses, anxiety, and so on. I’m guessing that many people would reject this idea. They would say that it’s an insult to their intelligence to suggest that they are that fixed on the idea of handed-down genes. ... Yet the same people seem to accept without question the idea that those maladaptions can be cured or at least managed by psychotropic medications – antidepressants, psychotropics. What they need to do is consider the intellectual formatting of their ideas. If we accept that chemicals are needed to change a mental or psychological maladaptions, then we must (ergo) accept that those problems are caused by chemical maladjustments in the brain. And on close inspection, this hypothesis, we must say, doesn’t make any sense at all.
From the perspective of ‘doing therapy’ and helping people feel better, it is not useful to adopt the genetic (hereditary) paradigm.
Even though in my book, I included a whole chapter (chapter nine, “The Gene Illusion”) and examined the ‘predisposition myth’ and what were the other powerful influences that might SEEM LIKE a genetic predisposition, that information was not about proving one thing or another. It is about realizing that what we tend to believe today about genetic predisposition toward depression (or any other psychological, mental or emotional problems for that matter) has never EVER been proven. Saying that it’s never been shown to be true is not the same thing as ‘it’s not true.’ I’m interested in you making your own mind up about the things you’re being told.
From the perspective of ‘doing therapy’ and helping people feel better, it is not useful to adopt the genetic (hereditary) paradigm.
Even though in my book, I included a whole chapter (chapter nine, “The Gene Illusion”) and examined the ‘predisposition myth’ and what were the other powerful influences that might SEEM LIKE a genetic predisposition, that information was not about proving one thing or another. It is about realizing that what we tend to believe today about genetic predisposition toward depression (or any other psychological, mental or emotional problems for that matter) has never EVER been proven. Saying that it’s never been shown to be true is not the same thing as ‘it’s not true.’ I’m interested in you making your own mind up about the things you’re being told.
For me, the jury is out. I am not a geneticist, and I’m not necessarily all that interested. It is enough for me to say that there may be some substance in the genetic proposition, but it does no good – in the therapeutic sense – to accept it. That acceptance can easily become a sort of “worshipping” of the "I have a disease that I can't do anything about" god, and the best, easiest and most effective way to never take any responsibility at all for one’s psychological personhood.
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