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> Bipolar disorder is genetic It is not. The question has been settled on a huge scale by historical events. If illnesses like bipolar disorder or schizophren

• vba616 4y ago
  Mental illness is a social phenomenon. There are lots of physical explanations for symptoms similar to psychosis - drugs, infection, immune disorders, chemotherapy, professional head trauma addict, but when nothing else clearly fits, "mentally ill" is the default, the end of the "switch" statement. The social construction of the category is embodied by the admission process at a hospital's mental ward. They literally go down the various causes that they can check for a disordered mental state, and if they can't find anything else, that is mental illness, end of story. In fact, lots of abnormal blood tests may be ignored if they don't fit into an obvious pattern. The meaning of the term is defined by what people with the power to assign it do. There is no abstract essence of it beyond the process as enacted. It's a label that serves a critical function of allowing society to abandon difficult diagnoses and redirect resources to others permanently. It doesn't represent an illness, but the lack of understanding what it is. This is not at all the same as the (unknown) constituent disorders being unphysical or one single entity. It's sort of like the "scientific creationists" that keep finding God in the gaps of science. There's always something left, but either you have faith in naturalistic explanations or not. If you aren't satisfied with science, you can't talk as though there is such a thing as scientific fact about the scientifically unknown, and implicitly lump it all together.
• Maursault 4y ago
  > If illnesses like bipolar disorder or schizophrenia were meaningfully caused by genetic factors, then the Nazi genocide of mentally ill people would have caused a dramatic and lasting reduction in mental illness post-war among the affected population. It didn't. Citation needed. The population of Germany alone in 1940 was over 70M people. The Nazi's killed an estimated 230K disabled individuals, including the physically disabled and the mentally ill. That only accounts for 3 tenths of a percent of the population, but ~50% of any population will be diagnosed with a mental illness at some point in their lifetime, so their efforts were astoundingly insufficient from a mathematical perspective. But whether someone is bipolar or not is not a simple trait like whether their earlobes are connected or whether they can roll their tongue. A massive genome study identified at least 64 regions of the genome that are associated with an increased risk of bipolar disorder. But even if it were a simple trait, there is such thing as recessive traits, so the Nazi's agenda was, of course, totally insane and could never be successful from a genetic perspective. Schizophrenia tends to run in families, but no single gene is thought to be responsible. Bipolar disorder is the most likely psychiatric disorder to be passed down genetically. If one parent has bipolar disorder, there's a 10% chance that their child will develop the illness.
  • vba616 4y ago
    >Citation needed. I read (ok, skimmed) an academic study that attempted to compare post-war populations with different histories, and failed to find evidence of an effect; if anything the reverse. I dislike your sophistry about 50% of the population being mentally ill, as if the victims were chosen from that portion at random. So, out of spite, I'm not going to search for the study and you are free to believe that it doesn't exist.
• bdlowery 4y ago
  It can be genetic. But, just because someone has bipolar disorder doesn’t mean they carry the gene for it. If you have Bipolar disorder you can get tested to see if you have the gene for it. If you don’t then it can’t be passed down. Source: someone in my immediate family has it and their doctor told them this, got tested, and found out they didn’t have gene for it.
  • vba616 4y ago
    There are many contexts in healthcare where it's considered socially acceptable not to be strictly honest and accurate. Psych drugs commonly say, or used to say, in the info leaflets something like they "correct imbalances of certain chemicals in the brain". This is completely made up, and apart from the vagueness, obviously not reasonable when you consider that such drugs usually take a considerable amount of time to have their full effect. But it's a customary "white lie" (or rather a fiction) to try to sooth patients and keep them confidently on meds. It's not a big secret, or a scandal, but an attempt to manipulate hopefully trusting people for their own good. As another example of the dynamic, doctors treat patients who are inevitably going to die in the near future, and if they sense the patient is still holding out hope and still wants treatment, they will probably avoid accurately communicating the reality, the number of weeks or days left, and instead say things about progress and remission until the end. I don't know what context "the gene" for bipolar disorder came up in, but could it possibly be that your family member was obsessed with "the gene" and the doctor humored them? You've heard of sugar pills?