The most stupendous era in the history of psychiatry?

One of the hazards of planning the outline of a book such as this in a free-wheeling session with one's fellow editors is that a casual remark about a possible chapter title can be written down and used in evidence against one. Nevertheless, rather than exercising editor's prerogative and changing the title of this chapter to something that sounds less like flippant hyperbole we have decided, after sober reflection, to retain the title and defend it because we believe that there is indeed a sound set of reasons for arguing that the current post-genomic era offers the greatest potential that has yet existed for profound scientific advances in psychiatry.

During much of its history psychiatry has been dogged by an unproductive and time wasting debate as to whether genes or environment play the domi­nant role in the causation of mental distress and disorder. Here, we will review briefly the evidence that the effects of genes on behaviour, both normal and abnormal, are pervasive and will go on to argue that genetic studies provide the best evidence in favour of the existence of environmental effects. The interplay between genes and environment has often been overlooked or over­simplified and one of the major sets of advances in modern psychiatric genet­ics has been the incorporation of environmental measures in genetic study _ designs and development of methods of statistical analysis that go beyond simple additive models.