Quote:
Originally Posted by NeonSamurai
In clinical practice the biology vs environment question invariably comes up when working with mental illness. The consideration of biology vs environment strongly ties into treatment planning; drugs are not a whole lot of use if the person's problems are all environmental, and therapy may not be of much benefit if the person's problems are entirely biological (there are some major exceptions to this). The problem though, is that often times it is difficult to tell what the underlying cause is; is the person depressed because they have few social contacts, or are they depressed because of a chemical imbalance that made them more anti-social and isolative, which caused the person to loose most of their social contacts. Generally speaking the answer is that both biology and environment are playing a role, and both are interacting with and influencing each other. This is why in modern clinical practice, the standard approach is to provide both drugs and therapy together to treat mental illness.
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My question would be, and it is something that I have wondered about for a long time, is the correlation between pre-natal genetics more powerful than the environmental factors in regards to severe and sudden mental illness? In other words, is there simply a switch that gets flipped in one's genes that say 'at 24, this individual will become schizophrenic', or are continued environmental stressors enough to push one towards it. I had come across students in my time in K-12 education that I thought may be future sufferers of the disorder, but do not pan out in that manner. Given the peculiarity of the onset of schizophrenia, is it possible to every truly know?