PSYCHOLOGY HAS LONG HELD THAT MENTAL ILLNESS IS BORN OF ADVERSE
EXPERIENCES.MORE RECENTLY, RESEARCH HAS POINTED THE FINGER AT FLAWED
GENES. NOW A THIRD CULPRIT MAY BE EMERGING: INVASION BY BACTERIA AND
VIRUSES.
Eight-year-old Seth broke from the grasp of Jane, his harried
mother, for the third time in 10 minutes. Tearing across the emergency
room, he stopped short, transfixed by a piece of paper lying on the
floor. His red-rimmed eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets and his
mouth twitched violently, as if he were in pain. Indifferent to Jane's
pleas to stop, he proceeded to pick up from the floor every piece of
paper, no matter how filthy, with hands that were reddened and raw. It
was the state of his hands that had precipitated the trip to the
hospital: Seth had spent most of the night in the bathroom, washing them
over and over.
With his head jerking spasmodically and his fingers pecking at
pieces of paper and cigarette butts, the boy resembled some strange
overgrown bird. Then, suddenly terrified, he flew back to Jane and began
pulling on her arm. "Mommy, Mommy, let's leave!" he whimpered. "They're
going to kill us. They're coming!"
Jane tried her best to calm him, but she too was beginning to
panic. Two days before, Seth had been a perfectly normal little boy whose
most serious health problems were the occasional cold or sore throat. He
had become mentally ill overnight.
What caused Seth's anxiety, his tics, his obsessive-compulsive
behavior? Astonishingly, it was probably that minor sore throat, his
doctors concluded. Today, scientists are increasingly coming to recognize
that the bacteria and viruses that frequently invade our bodies and cause
sore throats and other minor ailments may also unleash a host of major
mental and emotional illnesses, including anorexia, schizophrenia and
obsessive-compulsive disorder.
It is a theory sharply at odds with earlier views of the genesis of
psychological illness. Followers of Freud long held that mental and
emotional trouble is primarily the result of poor parenting, especially
by mothers. Indeed, until about 30 years ago, psychoanalysts frequently
placed the blame for schizophrenia on "schizophrenogenic" mothers.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder, also, was put at Mom's door. "It was
thought to be the result of harsh toilet training," observes Susan Swedo,
M.D., chief of pediatrics and developmental neuropsychiatry at the
National Institutes of Mental Health. But such theories, which added
immeasurable guilt to the burdens of parents with mentally ill offspring,
have turned out to have little evidence to back them up, most experts now
agree.
Instead, in recent years, the focus has shifted to genes as the
main source of mental illness. Faulty DNA is thought to be at least
partly responsible for, among other problems, anxiety and panic
disorders, schizophrenia, manic depression and antisocial personality
disorder, which is characterized by impulsive, excessively emotional and
erratic patterns of interpersonal behavior.
Yet genetics doesn't appear to wholly account for the occurrence of
major psychiatric ailments. If heredity alone were to blame, identical
twins would develop schizophrenia with a high degree of concordance, but
in fact in only 40% of cases in which one identical twin has the disease
does the other twin have it as well. Autism, though it has been observed
to run in families, also strikes five of every 10,000 children apparently
arbitrarily. Nor can depression and other affective disorders be
completely explained by damaged DNA. Says Ian Lipkin, Ph.D., a
neuroscientist and microbiologist at the University of California at
Irvine: "Genetics doesn't hold the key to understanding how to fit these
square pegs into round holes."
Bacteria and viruses may be that key, but scientists have been slow
to grasp the idea. Consider the case of syphilis, which is caused by the
bacterium Treponema pallidum. In its final, or tertiary, stage, the
disease can precipitate psychiatric problems like dementia, mania,
depression, delusions and Tourette's like tics. Though some scientists
suspected a connection between infection with the bacterium and the
mental disturbances that may take three to five decades to emerge, the
link became widely accepted only in the 1940s after the introduction of
the antibiotic penicillin as a treatment for syphilis. In the interim,
patients with syphilis who later developed psychiatric problems were
often institutionalized as crazy. But even with the link established,
Freud's theories were in ascendance and few scientists were willing to
consider that microbes might be a common source of other mental
illness.
Now, decades later, infection has emerged as a prime suspect in
psychological illnesses. The inadequacy of genetic and experiential
explanations has prompted scientists to look elsewhere--and their gaze
has come to rest on physical ailments, such as heart disease, cancers and
ulcers, that in some cases have an infectious origin. Could the same be
true, they wonder, for mental and emotional ills?
Tags:
bacteria,
culprit,
emergency room,
health problems,
infection,
lying on the floor,
mental illness,
neuroscience,
obsessive compulsive behavior,
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,
piece of paper,
serious health,
seth,
sore throat,
sore throats,
tics,
transfixed,
trip to the hospital,
virus
