Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Rachel Upthegrove  who is a Senior Clinical Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of Birmingham.  Childhood trauma is a risk factor for mental illness. This apparently simple statement, with such face validity hardly bears investigation does it? Of course traumatic events will increase the risk of mental distress and disorder - this is stating the obvious. However not all individuals with mental disorder have a history of trauma, or indeed childhood trauma, and certainly not all individuals who experience childhood trauma develop a mental illness. Childhood trauma has been in focus as an environmental risk factor for psychosis, with some authors proposing a causal role with significant lack of recognition and underreporting of childhood trauma in those who treat patients with psychosis. Mechanisms proposed include a process of hypervigilance leading to persecutory ideation and enhanced 'threat to self' networks. However, often studies have looked at s...

On 12th May 2015 in London I attended the " Psychiatry and Society " conference organised by the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Here I will summarise the talks I heard in sessions 2 and 3, emphasising those themes that have already been discussed in the blog. (If interested in session 1 of the conference, I reported on it last week). Session 2: Genetics, Neuroscience and Mental Disorder Neuroscientist  Pamela Sklar  asked "How may genetics change our understanding of mental illness?" and she focused on schizophrenia as a "mystery", that is a disorder that is both inherited and very common. Thousands of DNA alleles are involved in the risk of developing schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The difficulty in identifying the genetic bases of such disorders made some people think that research in this area was doomed to failure. But both for bipolar disorder and for schizophrenia some regions that increase risk have been discovered s...