Highly publicized reports in the New York Times, Forbes and other popular periodicals appeared this week about the new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (June 17th issue). The study challenged earlier research suggesting that depression is caused by a "depression gene.". The new study reaffirms research associated with the Human Genome Project which also clearly indicated there is no single depression gene that causes depression. In fact, the search for a “depression gene” has made it clear that not only has no depression gene been found, but no such gene will be found. What has been found, however, is that there is a heritability, a genetic predisposition to depression. But it is a relatively weak one that is highly modifiable by environmental factors.
For the people who continue to hold out hope for a biological cure, this is an inconvenient truth. As I have said in previous blogs, depression is much more of a social condition than a biological one, and just as there will never be a drug that cures poverty or racism, there will never be a drug that cures depression. For the people who want to blame their genes for their depression, they just lost support for their belief that there’s nothing they can do because of their genetic destiny.
Let’s face it directly: Depression is mostly a socialized phenomenon. You learned ways of thinking, coping, relating, being, that increased your vulnerability and put you at a higher level of risk. Depression has many causes, some of which are biological to be sure, but most of which are psychological and social. Consider these facts:
- Depression is striking people at younger and younger ages.
- As societies westernize, the rates of depression go up.
- As relationships decline in quantity and quality, depression increases.
- As people learn prevention skills, they show remarkable ability to prevent episodes from developing in the first place.
- As they go through psychotherapy to learn better coping skills as well as other mood management skills, they have fewer and less severe episodes and their brains change in measurable ways.
Just how much convincing does someone need to understand that focusing on the biology of depression alone isn’t nearly enough?
So, if depression isn’t in your genes, then where is it? It isn’t anywhere and, paradoxically, it’s everywhere. It’s in your thought processes, it’s in your relationships, it’s in your lifestyle, it’s in your diet, it’s in your level of physical wellness, it’s in your style of decision-making… shall I go on? Yet, what people write to me about is biology. They ask drug questions, they ask biochemistry questions, and they blog about herbal remedies and dietary supplements. It was interesting to me that psychiatrist Peter Kramer, the author of Listening to Prozac, wrote in his farewell PT blog this week that his experience was the same; people wrote in about drugs no matter how much he focused on the merits of psychotherapy. (You can still find his final blog on this PT site.)
With the evidence so strong that depression is largely a social phenomenon, and when the research highlights you don’t have a depression gene to blame, it means you can no longer be passive, taking a drug and sitting around waiting for it “to work.” The evidence is unambiguous that the more passive you are, the less you do to take active steps to help yourself out of depression, the worse you’re likely to feel. It’s why I’m a huge advocate of active, skill-building approaches based on sound therapeutic principles affirmed by good science that shows these methods work. I would strongly urge you to read my book, Breaking the Patterns of Depression for a thorough and easily applied self-help approach. It’s in bookstores and on Amazon. There are other books, too, of course, that emphasize skill building methods that can help, including David Burns’ book Feeling Good and Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky’s book, Mind Over Mood. But what you can now better appreciate, is that depression isn’t in your genes… it’s everywhere. That's why good help needs to be multi-faceted.
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