Position Paper by Catherine L. Harris, Ph.D..
Department of Psychology, Boston University
July 15, 1999
This position paper drafted in response to a request for input to all NIMH grantees, from the the Behavioral Science Workgroup, convened by the natinoal Advisory Mental Health Council.
The finding that biological predispositions play a strong role in mental disorders is the most powerful psychological finding of the century.
While this idea is widely accepted by psychologists, tremendous work remains to be done in making it part of commonsense psychology. As a teacher of psychology, I am struck by how my undergraduates come to class believing that a single traumatic event in childhood (particularly one with sexual connotations) will necessarily lead to lasting psychological damage. Mental health professionals no longer adhere to this type of "environmental determinism." It is likely that our ability to treat patients will improve when patients' conceptualizations of mental disorders are more align with of scientific psychology. Furthermore, educating the public about mental disorders will improve the conceptualization of researchers, as they come from the ranks of the general public, leading eventually to a more coherent behavioral science paradigm.
What are some of the ways to understand why biology would play a strong role in mental disorders, while environmental events would play a secondary role? Like others who were raised with a strong social-justice orientation, I originally feared that acknowledging the biological bases of mental disorders would open the flood-gates to biological determinism. Would individuals be seen as lacking the opportunity to steer their own lives? Would the grave social inequalities that co-occur with mental disorders be ignored?
But together with other researchers of my generation, exposure to interdisciplinary reading on humna behavior led me to reconceptualize the biological basis of mental disorders, with the help of an evolutionary perspective. The millions of years of mammalian and hominid evolution have created an extremely robust physiology and information processing system. This system is buffered against failure. Our nervous system is so well adapted that it is not likely to break down in the face of "mere" environmental stressors (think of the dangerous and frightening environments our ancestors faced, including death by predators, routine child abandonment and neglect, frequent poor nutrition and disease). When human beings are born with biological systems operating normally (i.e., without prenatal malnutrition, taratogens or genetic predispositions for less-than-optimal physiology), we are resilient against environmental trauma.
An evolutionary perspective can also aid in understanding psychopathologies. Genetic diversity is omnipresent. Behaviors that psychologists classify as maladative, such as antisocial personality disorder, may be extreme forms of behaviors that evolved under adaptive pressures. That is, APD may correspond to an extreme version of the "cheating" strategy which will work for some individuals some of the time, in all populations. Obsessive-compulsive disorder may be an extreme form of our species' sensitivity to social criticism, rules and rituals. Evolution shaped us to take advantage of environmental contingencies, so childhood is the time when biological predisposition can be accentuated or minimized.
In the last months (spring/summer 99) we saw the public shock and outcry on publication of empirical research showing that early sexual child abuse "is not in all cases devastating." Appreciating human resilience and the true causes of its the limitations, and spreading this knowledge to all people, should be a key priority for the Institute. One method of educating the public could be to encourage television and movie producers to hire psychologists as consultants, to reduce the entertainment industry's recycling of out-dated ideas about mental disorders.
One of my own papers is relevant to the topic of how both environment and biology are important for understanding psychopathology.
Dinn, W.M., Harris, C.L., Raynard, R.C. (1999). Post-traumatic obsessive compulsive disorder: A three-factor model. Psychiatry: Interpersonal and biological processes.
Here my co-authors and I discuss how OCD may be a joint product of childhood stressors, biological predispositions and a familial cognitive style that encourages rituals and magical thinking.