White King Orchid, a photo by Brisbane City Council on Flickr.
'Science writer David Dobbs is intrigued by this notion that the genes and traits that underlie some of our greatest weaknesses like despair, difficult behaviour and mental illness could also underlie our more positive aspects like optimism, empathy and resilience.'
'So the conclusion that the researchers drew was that this gene is not really a gene that simply makes you vulnerable to bad behaviour and bad environments, it makes you more sensitive to your environment and your experience and the kind of parenting you have ...
So it's not a gene for vulnerability, it's a gene for sensitivity to your environment and accordingly it can steer you on a lower darker path if you have a poor environment or a brighter sunnier happy more sociable path if you are luckier in your draw of parents and other things that affect your life.'
'The big change is that it sort of turns inside out the predominant genetic paradigm in psychiatry and much of behavioural genetics over the last 20 years or so ...
This plasticity hypothesis replaces vulnerability with overall responsiveness and it turns inside out the disease model ...
it's not a matter of resilience and vulnerability but how responsive you are to your experience in the environment.'
'And the idea there is to recognise that the patient, the person who is struggling, is not simply vulnerable and doomed through genetics and a history of bad environment to a life of depression or what not but the same responsiveness to environment can be an asset to them because to the extent that they can change their own environment they'll respond to those positive changes more.'
from Radio National, All In The Mind
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/orchids-dandelions-genes/4420952
