Genetics: If there鈥檚 mental illness in my family, will I get it?
When it comes to our physical health, genetics play a key role. The chance combination of genes we inherit from our parents determines our risk of certain diseases such as heart disease or some cancers. But is mental illness something we can inherit, and if so is there anything we can do about it?
It was a long held belief that conditions like depression were solely the result of life experiences. In fact, all mental health disorders have some genetic component. However, identifying which genes are responsible has been a very difficult challenge.
A breakthrough in research came in 2015 from analyzing the data of Chinese patients. In China, only extreme cases of depression tend to be diagnosed, so it was possible to study a set of patients with similar symptoms and from the same ethnic background. With a more homogenous group, researchers found two variations in patients’ DNA that were shown to affect the risk of depression. One of them was in a gene that controls mitochondria, which is the cell’s powerhouse of energy.
However, identifying the variants is only the first step in research to discover exactly what those variants are doing and why they might increase the risk of mental health conditions. Further studies have pointed to more genetic variations that may be involved in mental illness and surprisingly, some individual genes seem to be linked to more than one condition. For example, schizophrenia seems to also increase the risk of bipolar disorder and depression.
It’s hoped that decoding which genes are responsible for mental illnesses will one day mean that they can more easily be detected and treated, perhaps even before the symptoms arise.
So genes do affect mental illness – does that mean I can inherit it?
Your genes can influence your likelihood of developing a mental illness. For example, if one of your parents has depression then you are two times more likely to develop depression. For bipolar disorder, you are four times more likely and if one of your parents has schizophrenia, then you are eight times more likely to suffer from schizophrenia.
