From: deputydog23x@gmail.com   
      
   Psychology Today   
      
   The Infection Connection   
   Examines the possible connection of microorganism with psychological problems.   
   Cause of poor parenting; Technology that helps in revealing damage to the   
   brain.   
      
   By Harriet Washington, published on July 1, 1999 - last reviewed on January   
   23, 2015   
      
      
      
      
      
   PSYCHOLOGY HAS LONG HELD THAT MENTAL ILLNESS IS BORN OF ADVERSE   
   EXPERIENCES.MORE RECENTLY, RESEARCH HAS POINTED THE FINGER AT FLAWED   
   GENES. NOW A THIRD CULPRIT MAY BE EMERGING: INVASION BY BACTERIA AND   
   VIRUSES.   
      
   Eight-year-old Seth broke from the grasp of Jane, his harried   
   mother, for the third time in 10 minutes. Tearing across the emergency   
   room, he stopped short, transfixed by a piece of paper lying on the   
   floor. His red-rimmed eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets and his   
   mouth twitched violently, as if he were in pain. Indifferent to Jane's   
   pleas to stop, he proceeded to pick up from the floor every piece of   
   paper, no matter how filthy, with hands that were reddened and raw. It   
   was the state of his hands that had precipitated the trip to the   
   hospital: Seth had spent most of the night in the bathroom, washing them   
   over and over.   
      
   With his head jerking spasmodically and his fingers pecking at   
   pieces of paper and cigarette butts, the boy resembled some strange   
   overgrown bird. Then, suddenly terrified, he flew back to Jane and began   
   pulling on her arm. "Mommy, Mommy, let's leave!" he whimpered. "They're   
   going to kill us. They're coming!"   
      
   Jane tried her best to calm him, but she too was beginning to   
   panic. Two days before, Seth had been a perfectly normal little boy whose   
   most serious health problems were the occasional cold or sore throat. He   
   had become mentally ill overnight.   
      
      
   What caused Seth's anxiety, his tics, his obsessive-compulsive   
   behavior? Astonishingly, it was probably that minor sore throat, his   
   doctors concluded. Today, scientists are increasingly coming to recognize   
   that the bacteria and viruses that frequently invade our bodies and cause   
   sore throats and other minor ailments may also unleash a host of major   
   mental and emotional illnesses, including anorexia, schizophrenia and   
   obsessive-compulsive disorder.   
      
   It is a theory sharply at odds with earlier views of the genesis of   
   psychological illness. Followers of Freud long held that mental and   
   emotional trouble is primarily the result of poor parenting, especially   
   by mothers. Indeed, until about 30 years ago, psychoanalysts frequently   
   placed the blame for schizophrenia on "schizophrenogenic" mothers.   
   Obsessive-compulsive disorder, also, was put at Mom's door. "It was   
   thought to be the result of harsh toilet training," observes Susan Swedo,   
   M.D., chief of pediatrics and developmental neuropsychiatry at the   
   National Institutes of Mental Health. But such theories, which added   
   immeasurable guilt to the burdens of parents with mentally ill offspring,   
   have turned out to have little evidence to back them up, most experts now   
   agree.   
      
   Instead, in recent years, the focus has shifted to genes as the   
   main source of mental illness. Faulty DNA is thought to be at least   
   partly responsible for, among other problems, anxiety and panic   
   disorders, schizophrenia, manic depression and antisocial personality   
   disorder, which is characterized by impulsive, excessively emotional and   
   erratic patterns of interpersonal behavior.   
      
   Yet genetics doesn't appear to wholly account for the occurrence of   
   major psychiatric ailments. If heredity alone were to blame, identical   
   twins would develop schizophrenia with a high degree of concordance, but   
   in fact in only 40% of cases in which one identical twin has the disease   
   does the other twin have it as well. Autism, though it has been observed   
   to run in families, also strikes five of every 10,000 children apparently   
   arbitrarily. Nor can depression and other affective disorders be   
   completely explained by damaged DNA. Says Ian Lipkin, Ph.D., a   
   neuroscientist and microbiologist at the University of California at   
   Irvine: "Genetics doesn't hold the key to understanding how to fit these   
   square pegs into round holes."   
      
   Bacteria and viruses may be that key, but scientists have been slow   
   to grasp the idea. Consider the case of syphilis, which is caused by the   
   bacterium Treponema pallidum. In its final, or tertiary, stage, the   
   disease can precipitate psychiatric problems like dementia, mania,   
   depression, delusions and Tourette's like tics. Though some scientists   
   suspected a connection between infection with the bacterium and the   
   mental disturbances that may take three to five decades to emerge, the   
   link became widely accepted only in the 1940s after the introduction of   
   the antibiotic penicillin as a treatment for syphilis. In the interim,   
   patients with syphilis who later developed psychiatric problems were   
   often institutionalized as crazy. But even with the link established,   
   Freud's theories were in ascendance and few scientists were willing to   
   consider that microbes might be a common source of other mental   
   illness.   
      
   Now, decades later, infection has emerged as a prime suspect in   
   psychological illnesses. The inadequacy of genetic and experiential   
   explanations has prompted scientists to look elsewhere--and their gaze   
   has come to rest on physical ailments, such as heart disease, cancers and   
   ulcers, that in some cases have an infectious origin. Could the same be   
   true, they wonder, for mental and emotional ills?   
      
   Improved technology has made it easier to find out. Since active   
   only when inside other living creatures, microbes are notoriously hard to   
   grow, and therefore study, in the lab, but scientists' ability to do so   
   has increased steadily over the last few decades. Other tools have   
   allowed researchers to see their quarry more clearly. For about a decade,   
   microbiologists have used a technique called polymerase chain reaction,   
   or PCR, to replicate a small piece of genetic material over and over   
   until it forms a quantity large enough to study--and large enough to show   
   the lingering traces of an infection. A new variant of PCR, called   
   representational difference analysis, introduced in 1994, allows   
   scientists to go one step further and compare the differences between two   
   separate pieces of DNA (including healthy and diseased segments, for   
   instance). And the refinement of electron microscopes has permitted   
   researchers to follow the "footprints" left by infection in patients'   
   cerebrospinal fluid.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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