Environmental Risk and Gene–Environment Relationships in Psychiatric Disorders

Excerpt

Insisting on a distinction between “environmental” and “genetic” risks for psychiatric disorders is imprecise and can be counterproductive. The effect of a genetic variant on a psychiatric outcome may act through environmental pathways. Environmental exposures encountered in life are partly a consequence of how our own heritable traits and predispositions, or those of our parents, interact with our surroundings. This chapter reviews key methods to establish whether an environmental exposure causes an increase in the risk to develop psychopathology or whether it causes psychopathology to relapse. A set of widely studied environmental risks are reviewed for their impact on psychopathology: bereavement, loss, family strife, childhood maltreatment, childhood sexual abuse, trauma, migration and minority stress, exposure to (substance) abuse, sleep, education, and income.