Most psychiatrists used to agree that, in order
to best treat patients with psychological problems, we should use what has
been termed the biopsychosocial
model. This means that both the behavior problem and/or mental disorder is
caused or maintained by a combination of factors including biological and genetic
propensities, psychological processes including affects, cognitions, defenses,
etc., and social factors such as dysfunctional interpersonal relationships and
history of trauma. Treatment should
address all of the important contributing factors.
If fact, there are no biological, psychological, or social factors that are either
necessary or sufficient to produce the vast majority of mental disorders and
behavioral problems. There are only risk
factors, or factors that increase or decrease the odds that someone will develop and/or maintain such problems. Whichever factor you choose, some people will
have none of it and will develop the disorder, while others will have a lot of it
and not develop the disorder.
In theory, no one in the field will admit that
they favor only focusing on one domain or another, or as philosophers call doing
that, reductionism. But lately,
psychiatrists in particular are using a bio-bio-bio model. In particular, genetic influences on behavior
are grossly exaggerated, despite the fact that any neurobiologist worth his
salt knows that no complex human behavior is caused by one gene or one group of
genes.
Human beings are not very instinctual. A great deal of
what we do is learned.
Hell, we don’t even know how to do something as biologically important
as procreate, unless someone tells us how or we discover sexual intercourse
through trial and error. (Fortunately,
most of us figure it out eventually). We all have the biological urge to merge, of course, but how to go
about it? We don’t know innately. Unlike
say, a certain species of wasp that always does a complicated mating dance that is
identical to that performed by every other wasp of the same species - without
the benefit of having seen another wasp do the dance.
It is important to remember that the vast
majority of genes in a given cell are turned off. They ain’t doin’ nothin’. They only get
turned on by environmental factors. In
terms of neurons, the environmental factors that turn them off and on are quite often those from the interpersonal
environment. Furthermore, all neural
pathways in the brain compete with each other in a Darwinian, survival of the
fittest sense. If they are not
stimulated by the environment, synaptic connections between neurons weaken and
then disappear altogether. If they are stimulated repeatedly, they get stronger (long-term potentiation).
The only exceptions are certain tracts in
a part of the brain called the amygdala, which form early in life in response to
attachment figures. You know, parents. These synaptic pathways seem to be
highly resistant to weakening through the usual process of neural plasticity. They can be overridden but not destroyed. There
are, in fact, cells in the amygdala that respond only to a mother’s face, and others that respond only to a father's. Maybe Freud was on to something after all.
And then there’s the matter of a major function
of the human brain: the ability to set goals, make mental models of possible
strategies for achieving those goals, planning them out, anticipating and visualizing problems that may arise, putting effort into
them, revising them along the way as new information becomes available, and
then achieving them. This brain function
seems to be thought of as non-existent by those who study the "heritability" of human behavior. This, despite the fact that those who design
such studies are in the process of doing that very thing!!
Allow me to provide a primer on the nature of human
behavior and its antecedents, using human language as the example.
Beginning with linguistics expert Noam Chomsky
(whatever you think of his politics being irrelevant), linguists have shown repeatedly
that there is a huge genetic
component to human language. The human brain structure limits the possible
syntactical and grammatical forms language can take, as well as the available
sounds.
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| Noam Chomsky |
However, whether you speak Greek or Swahili is entirely determined, 100%, by your
environment.
And whether you speak Greek and Swahili is usually determined 100%
by your conscious decision to learn a second language and the effort you choose to put into the task.
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