[Paleopsych] The Times: Nature, nurture and family problems

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Nature, nurture and family problems
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8123-1478276,00.html
February 11, 2005

    by Dr Thomas Stuttaford
    Repeating the mistakes of our parents

    CATHERINE O'BRIEN'S interview with Lisa St Aubin de Terán in T2 on
    Wednesday was a fascinating example of the repetitive nature of
    familial patterns of behaviour. Her mother had four marriages, all of
    them, according to her daughter, failures. Another failure in her
    mother's life was her botched attempt at committing suicide.

    Fortunately for Lisa, her mother failed, but once she had recovered
    she became totally dependent on her daughter.

    Lisa, too, has had a tumultuous marital and emotional life. Probably
    her own upbringing had not only left her, as she says, "precocious,
    obnoxious and spoilt" but with a penchant for the unusual and exotic.
    She married a schizophrenic, violent South American bank robber who
    had picked her up at a bus stop in Clapham, London, when she was only
    16 and followed her relentlessly while he tried to persuade her to
    marry him.

    She also survived suicidal intentions, but in her case it was a pact
    proposed by her husband while they were in Italy, rather than a
    determined attempt, as her mother's had been. But Lisa fled with her
    daughter back to the UK, where she could opt out of the marriage.

    Lisa's second marriage was to George MacBeth, a poet, who was living
    in Norfolk. Later she wed an artist and now lives with Mees Ven Deth,
    a cameraman in Amsterdam. Mother and daughter have scored nearly
    equally in the marital stakes.

    It is not at all uncommon for marriage patterns to repeat themselves,
    but the question that Lisa St Aubin de Terán has not ventured to
    answer is whether this is the result of nature or nurture.

    Thirty years ago it would have been almost unthinkable for any decent,
    liberal doctor to suggest that heredity determined character just as
    it determines eye colour, the shape of the ears, bodily strength and
    even, to a great extent, the likelihood of developing cardiovascular
    disease or many cancers.

    Though doctors used to favour nurture over nature as the chief
    determinant of character, farmers and vets had no doubts about this
    and reversed the importance of the two factors. They would be as
    unlikely to breed from a dog that bit, or even a cow so irritable that
    it was nearly impossible to milk, as they would from a dog with a
    congenitally dislocating hip or a cow with a low milk yield. It is one
    of the arrogances of humankind that we think we obey a different set
    of rules to the rest of the animal kingdom.

    The accepted current opinion -- and experience suggests it is true --
    is that although our characters, even more than those of animals, are
    influenced by environment, they are also heavily determined by our
    genes.

    Fresh evidence for this appears in Archives of General Psychiatry and
    is reproduced in the magazine GP. Research workers have investigated
    the heredity of children who suffer from severe anxiety. A study of
    families over three generations found that 60 per cent of children who
    had a depressed parent and grandparent had a psychiatric disorder by
    the time they were 12. This study also showed that in these 47
    families, who had been followed since 1982, a child of a depressed
    parent was 14 times more likely to develop depression if one
    grandparent was also depressed. Forty-five per cent of these children
    were also excessively anxious and more than a quarter were disruptive.

    Overall, if either parent as well as any one of the grandparents had a
    psychiatric problem, there was a 59 per cent chance that the child
    would have a difficult psychiatric history.

    It is too simple to suggest that this is entirely a genetic response,
    as any genetic disability inherited by a child is frequently
    compounded by the upbringing that child receives. A patient with a
    psychiatric problem may be an excellent father or mother, but the
    chances are that their particular emotional and psychological
    difficulties will be reflected in both physical and emotional
    difficulties experienced in the bringing up of their children.

    Dr Myrna Weissman, who was the lead worker on this project, emphasised
    in an interview with GP that although depression in two consecutive
    generations of a family led to children having enormously high rates
    of psychiatric problems at a young age, this did not mean that medical
    intervention to treat the parents could not still benefit their
    children.