Psychiatric Disorders Have a Genetic Component. Now What? |
“Ultimately, we'll help the people we discriminate against if we try to understand more about them; genetics will lead to a world where there is a sympathy for the underdog.”—James D. Watson
A recent large-scale study (Grotzinger et al, 2025) has found that psychiatric disorders have a genetic basis. Psychiatrists have always suspected as much, but no one has ever found a specific gene responsible for, say, anxiety. Instead, this new study shows that it takes a combination of several gene variants to lay the foundation for potential disorders.
The study found that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have similar genetic underpinnings. Rather than discrete syndromes, they may be like different colors on a spectrum. Similarly, depression, anxiety, and PTSD may represent colors on a different spectrum.
Outside of twins, we all have slightly varying genes that make us unique. The gene for eye color, for instance, includes blue, green, and brown variants. Some of the genetic variants are merely decorative, like eye, hair, or skin color, but others have more important functional differences, such as determining how our brain gets wired up.
Only a handful of genes are truly decisive: Huntington’s disease, for example, is an inescapable consequence of a mutation in a gene involved in brain function. But most of these newly discovered genetic variants are more subtle. The researchers found 238 variants involved in psychiatric disorders, none of which were definitive alone, but when........