A link to the following article is dual-posted to this page and the About Psychosis page.

Excerpt: “This disease has been misunderstood for 4,000 years”

It is unlikely that the researchers in this study experienced an epiphany about the biological root cause of Schizophrenia. My take on this article is that science is slowly discovering some of the biomarkers and early developmental anomalies that have thus far been hypothesized but undocumented by scientific studies. For many decades now, most competent doctors and scientists have known that Schizophrenia is caused by hereditary developmental factors.  Yes, there may be a much smaller number of cases where the pathophysiology is tied to acquired biological factors, but the disease is predominantly heritable.  Even over the course of thousands of years, there have been people possessed of rare insight who discerned that the affliction was one of body, not spirit.

I suspect that some of linkages that continue to be made between trauma, stress, and abuse (see hyperlink labeled “bullying”) might be misconstrued.  The relationships may not be linear.  I suspect that the heritable or acquired disorders may be the cause for neural-atypical responses to stress factors.  In the case of bullying, it might well be that the heritable odd or quirky behaviors exhibited by some young people on the pathway toward psychosis-spectrum disorders, may attract bullying – but the bullying itself is not causal.  In the case of abuse, and other such traumas, the abusive behaviors of parental figures may be linked to genetic-based spectrum issues in the abuser and the subsequent development of psychosis-spectrum disorder in the child linked to the same genetics.  It is without a doubt that psychological trauma and toxic stress can cause severe psychological damage, and stress is known to have deleterious physiological repercussions.  However, there relationship between the abuse and development of the specific neural damage that causes psychosis is highly suspect.

Human beings are typically resilient beyond the psychological frailties that are normal characteristics of our species.  It is also the case that the troublesome lot of psychologists and psychiatrists who fervently believe in the trauma/abuse causation of Schizophrenia are responsible for creating the statistical observations that they use to promote their beliefs and preserve the relevance of their psychotherapeutic practices.  This very troublesome cohort of theorists do not just promote their beliefs, they proselytize as if on a mission of salvation.  Most of them mean well, but they are actually doing a great deal of harm to patients, and in some respects, contributing to criminalization of SMI.

Given the violent, chaotic, trauma-producing world that we all live in, it is likely that half or maybe more of the population on this globe would be suffering from psychosis if trauma, stress and abuse were root causes.