Preface

 

 

We are approaching a period of crisis in the social and behavioral sciences, as decades of attempts to discover “genes for behavior” have, with possible rare exceptions, failed to produce confirmed discoveries. Schizophrenia is the most studied psychiatric disorder, yet in an official 2013 press release the American Psychiatric Association admitted that psychiatry is “still waiting” for the identification of “biological and genetic markers” for its disorders. Although some gene discovery claims have appeared since then, psychiatry continues to “wait.”

 

I am a clinical psychologist practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have been interested in the “genetics of schizophrenia” topic since the 1990s, beginning with my 1998 doctoral dissertation A Critical Analysis of the Genetic Theory of Schizophrenia. It was around that time that I became interested in the works of critics of the mental health system and the medical model, such as Peter Breggin, David Cohen, David Cooper, Erving Goffman, David Hill, R. D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, and others. This led me to authors who had critically analyzed genetic research in psychiatry and psychology, which include Mary Boyle, Stephan Jay Gould, Don Jackson, Leon Kamin, Richard Lewontin, Theodore Lidz, Alvin Pam, Ken Richardson, and Steven Rose. My first article on schizophrenia and genetics was published in 1999, and between 2003 and 2015 I published three books critically examining genetic research in the social and behavioral sciences. For 20 years, I have looked closely at the methodological shortcomings and controversial assumptions in twin research, including studies of reared-together and reared-apart twin pairs.

 

Although according to authoritative mainstream authors and researchers “we know” that schizophrenia has an important hereditary basis, there is another side to this story that is largely ignored by psychiatry and the media. My desire to help tell this side of the story led me to choose my dissertation topic 20 years ago. Continuing the work of the pioneering researchers and commentators mentioned above, and drawing from my previous analyses, here I focus on the massive flaws of schizophrenia genetic research in the context of gene discovery failure.

 

In Chapter 1, I discuss the schizophrenia concept from several different perspectives, and I review several problems with genetic explanations. Chapter 2 describes the ongoing failure to make confirmed discoveries of genes shown to cause schizophrenia and psychosis, and contains a brief critique of the heritability concept. In Chapter 3, I discuss schizophrenia family studies. I show in Chapter 4 that schizophrenia twin studies are based on a critical theoretical assumption that is clearly false, and therefore provide no evidence in favor of genetics. In Chapter 5, which comprises over half of the book, I examine in detail the major problem areas in the most frequently cited adoption studies. These studies played an important role in turning the tide in favor of genetics, yet serve as an example of how entire scientific fields can overlook massively flawed and biased research performed by leading researchers. In Chapter 6, I join calls for a shift in the study of the causes, treatment, and prevention of schizophrenia and psychosis from currently dominant biological and genetic approaches, to non-medical and environmental approaches. My analysis applies to most other “nature-nurture” areas of behavior as well, because similar methods are used. The implications, therefore, are enormous.

 

I have attempted to cover the main topics and controversies in a way that people outside of the mental health field can understand, and I have therefore kept data reporting to a minimum. For additional information, I have included numerous links to currently available relevant websites, publications, and videos. In contrast to most of what is written in social and behavioral science textbooks, in this e-book I challenge claims made by many of the world’s leading researchers, and show that genetic explanations of schizophrenia rest on false foundations. I am confident that readers will find my analysis refreshingly different from the predicable, sometimes inaccurate, and usually uncritical academic and journalistic accounts of the “genetics of schizophrenia” topic.

 

 

 

Jay Joseph, Psy.D.

August, 2017