Hundreds more genes linked to depression
January 15, 2025 7:16 PM   Subscribe

 
My first thought was an Onion article with something like: "Being alive linked to depression." But more seriously, this is extremely valuable and flies in the face of so many people who feel like those with depression just need to "get their groove back" or "snap out of it." I hope it not only helps push research to work on identifying risk factors and treatment, but also helps people who have depression (and those who love and care for them) feel more supported and better understood knowing that it something really outside of their control.
posted by Toddles at 8:24 PM on January 15 [10 favorites]


Counterpoint: We could try and get the blithely self-confident people in on the depression geneset so they stop mucking everything up with their latest great (terrible) ideas...
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 9:40 PM on January 15 [11 favorites]


Research into the genetic contribution to most things seems to be finding large numbers of genes with small effects, which, given that there are only so many genes, at some point begins to suggest that everything is kind of correlated with everything else. I suppose anything has the potential to lay groundwork but this doesn’t necessarily feel like the most promising picture when it comes to hope for easy fixes.
posted by atoxyl at 9:50 PM on January 15 [9 favorites]


That’s a lot of genes!
posted by Captaintripps at 5:47 AM on January 16


Kind of flabbergasting that anyone's NOT depressed.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:38 AM on January 16 [1 favorite]


After thousands of years of selective breeding, genetics can only explain 1/4 of a dog’s personality. It seems pretty unlikely that we’ll find any genes that are even mostly responsible for depression.

The “it’s in your head, so it’s fake” or “it’s biological, so it’s real” binary needs to die. Depression is serious and real regardless of any biological basis we can identify.
posted by Headfullofair at 7:32 AM on January 16 [9 favorites]


What I think is kind of interesting though is that finding a biological basis may clarify if we're talking about an actual--I don't know the word for it, 'disease entity'--versus discovering that depression is more of a symptom, part of some other underlying condition.

So much of what we understand about mental and emotional problems is based on, like, what a bunch of psychiatrists agree to; the definitions are social outcomes, results of a political rather than a scientific process (the DSM, the serotonin model). It would be interesting to find out what happens if we were to have a more objective basis for those definitions.
posted by mittens at 8:11 AM on January 16 [1 favorite]


I'm not surprised by this finding, nor by the many other similar findings re: e.g. anxiety or schizophrenia. It speaks to a major, potentially dead-end flaw in this kind of genetic research paradigm as applied to mental illnesses: the overreliance on signifiers like "depression" (or "anxiety" or "schizophrenia") as objects of scientific inquiry. More specifically, it's the broad trend of over-reifying "depression" as a thing-in-itself, as something which may exist in its own right rather than as a linguistic signpost that we use to reference a complex network of events (including other signifiers), all of which happen both within and between individuals, and between individuals and their material environments.

To be fair, language induces this tendency generally in anyone who speaks, but it's something that even scientists are not thoughtful enough about, in my observation. And certainly recent trends in the discourse around therapy/"mental health" has only entrenched this reification deeper and deeper.
posted by obliterati at 9:25 AM on January 16 [5 favorites]


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