Environmental Connections: A Deeper Look into Mental Illness

M ental illnesses produce some of the most challenging health problems faced by society, accounting for vast numbers of hospitalizations, disabilities resulting in billions in lost productivity, and sharply elevated risks for suicide. Scientists have long known that these potentially devastating conditions arise from combinations of genes and environmental factors. Genetic research has produced intriguing biological insights into mental illness, showing that particular gene variations predispose some individuals to conditions such as depression and schizophrenia. Now, thanks to a growing union of epidemiology and molecular biology, the role of the environment in the etiology of mental illness has become more clear. Indeed, E. Fuller Torrey, president of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit organization that promotes treatment advances in psychiatry, suggests that mental illnesses increasingly fall into the realm of environmental health. And from that platform, he says, new treatment advances could soon emerge. " Some of the greatest advancements in twentieth-century medicine were achieved by identifying and preventing infectious diseases through vaccination, improved sanitary measures , improved nutrition, and diminished hazards of environmental contaminants, " adds Alan Brown, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University Medical Center. " If environmental risk factors for [mental illness] can be validated and confirmed, there is every reason to expect they will point to preventive measures that lower their risks and morbidity. " Everything But the Gene Scientists define " environment " in the realm of mental illness broadly, some going so far as to suggest it encompasses everything that isn't an inherited gene. That's a departure from traditional thinking in environmental health, however , which has historically viewed environmental threats in the context of infectious agents, pollutants, and other exogenous factors that influence the individual's physical surroundings. Environmental threats to mental health include these traditional parameters— along with pharmaceutical and illicit drugs,