Depression ‘triggered by life traumas’
TOO much money is spent researching biological factors for mental illness when it is mostly caused by life events, psychologists have warned.
Funding bodies such as the Medical Research Council (MRC) have spent hundreds of millions on genetics and the biology of mental illness with limited success and not enough on understanding social factors.
Although scientists have discovered genes that make people more susceptible to certain disorders, experts say that the real causes of depression and anxiety are social crises such as unemployment or childhood abuse.
They say that money should be redirected towards understanding everyday triggers. Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme Peter Kinderman, Professor of Clinical Psychology at Liverpool University, said: ‘Of course every single action, every emotion I’ve ever had involves the brain, so to have a piece of scientific research telling us that the brain is involved in responding emotionally to events doesn’t really advance understanding very much.
‘And yet it detracts from the fact that when unemployment rates go up in a particular locality you get a measurable number of suicides.
‘ It detracts from the i dea that trauma in childhood is a very, very powerful predictor of serious problems like experiencing psychotic events in adult life, so of course the brain is involved and of course genes are involved, but not very much, and an excessive focus on those issues takes us away from these very important social factors.’
Mental health issues cost Britain £70billion a year according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The think-tank said mental health was the cause of 40 per cent of 370,000 new claims for disability benefit each year. Almost half of all adults will suffer from a mental health condition in their lifetime and one in four people have been diagnosed with some type of mental health problem, most commonly depression.
Despite this, the MRC spends only 3 per cent of its research budget on mental health. And most of that goes towards understanding genetics or neuroscience.
Professor Richard Bentall, who also works at Liverpool University, said: ‘It’s a tragedy actually. The UK MRC is one of the biggest funders of medical research in the UK but if you look at the things that they fund, by far the majority are things like brain scanners or gene sequencing machines, almost none of it is going towards understanding psychological mechanisms or social circumstances by which these problems develop.
‘It is impossible to get funding to look at these kinds of things.’
The MRC said it was hoping to increase the amount of money allocated to studies into mental illness.
Dr Rob Buckle, of the MRC, said: ‘I think it has been a long- standing debate, the issue of nature versus nurture, and the MRC needs to make sure it funds the research which is going to have the most impact wherever it comes from.
‘The issue here is that mental health is a very complex issue and the fundamental thing is to get a better understanding of the causes and progression of mental illness.’
‘It is impossible to get funding’