As someone who has no scientific training and is interested in the genetics of psychiatric conditions, I appreciate your clear writing on this subject. It’s a particularly confusing subject. I intend to read some of your earlier posts.
I do feel that you are missing something, though. Maybe MIA is going to extremes concerning genetics, but they’re only doing what psychiatrists have always done. You say MIA “offers overly simplistic answers to complex questions.” But that’s just what the earlier researchers did, referring to schizophrenia as if it were a “genetic disorder” and not being caused by many factors. Before that, many claimed that it was caused by bad mothering, and there was a backlash to that—mothers got angry!—so they switched to, no, it’s entirely a brain disease. Unfortunately, everyone—scientists too!—tends to cling to theories that focus on just one cause. I guess that’s changing in psychiatry, but it’s still got a long way to go.
You also say that MIA “presents the psychiatric profession as homogenous, corrupt, and self-serving.” I don’t think the profession is homogenous these days, rather in a state of confusion! but maybe that’s because it’s in a state of change, and maybe that’s good.
As for corrupt, do you really think psychiatrists are any less corrupt than anyone else? Is ‘corrupt’ the right word for a profession that has been influenced so much by the money of the pharmaceutical companies? Would you call Freud and all who followed him corrupt in denying the evidence of incest and claiming, without evidence, that very young children fantasize about sex with their parents? Seems corrupt to me. Psychiatry has a history of corruption, as MIA, among others, usefully points out.
Thank you for putting the work into refuting disinformation from MIA. “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” - Alberto Brandolini.
Thank you very much for this thorough critique of Whitaker’s misleading pronouncements about the genetics of schizophrenia—his latest salvo in the anti-psychiatry campaign he and his MIA army have been waging for some time. I am not qualified to evaluate the complexities of the genetics or the statistical arguments. But I have observed the damage that the anti-medical view of mental illness can do. Of course questions of etiology are infinitely complicated (and not resolvable in my lifetime). These are not just academic questions, however. “Have a better childhood” or “wait for a society to be more humanely organized” don’t cut it as solutions faced with acute mental suffering. The consequences of accepting Whitaker’s anti-medical propaganda can be dire. He positions himself in part as a crusader against the greed of Big Pharma, but he too has a dog in the fight. I don’t claim to know his motives, but Whitaker's livelihood is dependent on promoting his own ideological position. He is a journalist and the exposé is his bread and butter: An important function, but not when the baby goes the way of the bathwater and no realistic alternative is on offer.
Perhaps it is human nature to take a dim view of doctors—like undertakers, they inhabit a realm we would all rather avoid. They become associated with illness and pain and so end up being blamed for its existence.
Just read Aftab piece on JAMA v MIA on ‘genetics’. Far too much for proper argument here but It would be good if there was some humility. The most sophisticated writers know that they are struggling in the dark in this domain. There are trillions of synaptic connections in the human brain and gene/SNP expressions and connections are highly malleable or plastic. Nearly everyone has not got too far beyond the” P=G x E” formulation and the aspects of ‘E’ that have been ‘studied’ are predictable and they are political – cannabis use, in utero insults, obstetric complications etc. Probably the only non ‘biologically oriented aspects of ‘E’ that have been examined are urbanicity especially ethnic density. In the domain of ‘heritability’ so-called, for example, regression models, correlations and other ‘elemental’ ones fail to recognise that the brain, body and world are integrally connected and can’t be reduced to ‘components’. MIA and JAMA equally “don’t know what they don’t know” and to position JAMA as the ‘experts’ and MIA as ‘populists’ (not of the positive kind) is not a scientific argument as Awais Aftab well knows. It is simply spin to invoke the Trumps, Bolsonaros, Erdogans etc of this world here and if Aftab doesn’t like ‘connotations’ he should just think about what’s implied by this term ‘populism’. It is far too serious for a start. I am a novice in this domain and claim just the ‘ordinary public interest’ Aftab worries about. I just suggest reading Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose forthcoming book The Future of Humanity: Being Human in a Post-Human World.
As someone who has no scientific training and is interested in the genetics of psychiatric conditions, I appreciate your clear writing on this subject. It’s a particularly confusing subject. I intend to read some of your earlier posts.
I do feel that you are missing something, though. Maybe MIA is going to extremes concerning genetics, but they’re only doing what psychiatrists have always done. You say MIA “offers overly simplistic answers to complex questions.” But that’s just what the earlier researchers did, referring to schizophrenia as if it were a “genetic disorder” and not being caused by many factors. Before that, many claimed that it was caused by bad mothering, and there was a backlash to that—mothers got angry!—so they switched to, no, it’s entirely a brain disease. Unfortunately, everyone—scientists too!—tends to cling to theories that focus on just one cause. I guess that’s changing in psychiatry, but it’s still got a long way to go.
You also say that MIA “presents the psychiatric profession as homogenous, corrupt, and self-serving.” I don’t think the profession is homogenous these days, rather in a state of confusion! but maybe that’s because it’s in a state of change, and maybe that’s good.
As for corrupt, do you really think psychiatrists are any less corrupt than anyone else? Is ‘corrupt’ the right word for a profession that has been influenced so much by the money of the pharmaceutical companies? Would you call Freud and all who followed him corrupt in denying the evidence of incest and claiming, without evidence, that very young children fantasize about sex with their parents? Seems corrupt to me. Psychiatry has a history of corruption, as MIA, among others, usefully points out.
Thank you for putting the work into refuting disinformation from MIA. “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.” - Alberto Brandolini.
Thank you very much for this thorough critique of Whitaker’s misleading pronouncements about the genetics of schizophrenia—his latest salvo in the anti-psychiatry campaign he and his MIA army have been waging for some time. I am not qualified to evaluate the complexities of the genetics or the statistical arguments. But I have observed the damage that the anti-medical view of mental illness can do. Of course questions of etiology are infinitely complicated (and not resolvable in my lifetime). These are not just academic questions, however. “Have a better childhood” or “wait for a society to be more humanely organized” don’t cut it as solutions faced with acute mental suffering. The consequences of accepting Whitaker’s anti-medical propaganda can be dire. He positions himself in part as a crusader against the greed of Big Pharma, but he too has a dog in the fight. I don’t claim to know his motives, but Whitaker's livelihood is dependent on promoting his own ideological position. He is a journalist and the exposé is his bread and butter: An important function, but not when the baby goes the way of the bathwater and no realistic alternative is on offer.
Perhaps it is human nature to take a dim view of doctors—like undertakers, they inhabit a realm we would all rather avoid. They become associated with illness and pain and so end up being blamed for its existence.
This is an excellent, and helpful, review of MIA. Thank you Awais :).
Just read Aftab piece on JAMA v MIA on ‘genetics’. Far too much for proper argument here but It would be good if there was some humility. The most sophisticated writers know that they are struggling in the dark in this domain. There are trillions of synaptic connections in the human brain and gene/SNP expressions and connections are highly malleable or plastic. Nearly everyone has not got too far beyond the” P=G x E” formulation and the aspects of ‘E’ that have been ‘studied’ are predictable and they are political – cannabis use, in utero insults, obstetric complications etc. Probably the only non ‘biologically oriented aspects of ‘E’ that have been examined are urbanicity especially ethnic density. In the domain of ‘heritability’ so-called, for example, regression models, correlations and other ‘elemental’ ones fail to recognise that the brain, body and world are integrally connected and can’t be reduced to ‘components’. MIA and JAMA equally “don’t know what they don’t know” and to position JAMA as the ‘experts’ and MIA as ‘populists’ (not of the positive kind) is not a scientific argument as Awais Aftab well knows. It is simply spin to invoke the Trumps, Bolsonaros, Erdogans etc of this world here and if Aftab doesn’t like ‘connotations’ he should just think about what’s implied by this term ‘populism’. It is far too serious for a start. I am a novice in this domain and claim just the ‘ordinary public interest’ Aftab worries about. I just suggest reading Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose forthcoming book The Future of Humanity: Being Human in a Post-Human World.
Madinaction