It only took 50 years and many ruined lives for the truth to emerge

There was a story in the news today about a study to be published in the journal, Science which for the first time convincingly demonstrates that there are genetic factors associated with schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia Linked with Rare Often Unique Genetic Glitches

This story had particular resonance for me because my father was an influential Freudian psychologist whose career peaked in the 1950s. Many of his older psychiatrist friends had been students of Freud. So while I was growing up, I sat in on many a dinner table conversation between my father and his peers about schizophrenia and its causes.

My father's psychiatrist friends were powerful people in the psychiatric establishment in New York City. Often they'd brag about their celebrity clients. And they had no doubt at all about what caused schizophrenia: bad mothering.

The theories varied in details. Did a child become schizophrenic because they had what Bettelheim called a "refrigerator mother," or should the blame fall on the inconsistent mother who gave the child mixed messages? Others blamed the mother whose feminine sexual expression was too strong, but then, equal damage might have been done by the mother who confused her son about his gender identity by not being feminine enough.

All these theories had in common only this--that these influential doctors wrote and taught that the ultimate cause of schizophrenia was something the patient's mother had done wrong. And that these experts were utterly and irredeemably wrong.

But such was the power of these men within their profession that for decades they added an inconceivably cruel burden to the lives of the mothers whose lives were already hard enough, by telling them that their children's terrible untreatable mental condition was all their fault.

So you can imagine how I felt when I read that after years of futile searching for genetic causes of schizophrenia, scientists had been able to use new, sophisticated techniques of examining the genome to begin to identify some of the many different genetic flaws that interfere with the complex pathways involved in how the brain processes thought.

And that of course made me think of how another generation of powerful experts continue to increase the load of misery on another population whose condition is most certainly genetic in nature too: people with Type 2 diabetes.

Like schizophrenia, Type 2 diabetes is not one disorder, and it is not caused by one gene. Dozens of genes have been linked to the development of Type 2 diabetes--genes that affect insulin secretion, the function of mitochondria, and many other subtle factors. Only slowly is it starting to become clear that genetic flaws--inherited or induced by environmental toxins--disrupt glucose metabolism at any of a multitude of locations in the complex pathways involved and that without such a genetic flaw, no matter how fat or sedentary a person might be, they don't develop diabetes.

Don't expect the experts to change their tune on this, though. You'll still read diabetes "experts" pontificating that diabetes is "caused by obesity" and could be cured if people lost a couple pounds eating a low fat diet and got off their lazy butts and exercised.

In the case of psychiatry, my dad's friends never gave up their misguided theories. My dad died still convinced that Freud's toxic theories could explain anything that happened in the personality. But no one lives forever, and now he and his peers are all gone, replaced by a newer generation of psychiatrists who ditched Freud's toxic woman-hating theories in favor of drug treatments that, whatever their failings, could at least improve the lives of their patients.

We will probably have to wait for the current crop of experts to retire to see the same kind of change in public understanding of diabetes. One cannot help but hope that the diabetes experts continue to eat the low fat diets they are so enthusiastic about and maintain for themselves the A1cs they push on the public, to hasten the process.

But in fifty years the public will look with the same kind of horror on the doctors who blamed children and adults for causing their own Type 2 as they do on those toxic mother-hating theories.

I just hope I can hang on long enough to see it happen!