If we had no schizophrenia gene, would we have had no David Bowie? (or “The Manufacture of Consciousness”)
David Bowie’s mother, Peggy, once remarked that her family was tainted by mental illness. It visited a number of his maternal aunts and, of course, his half-brother, Terry Burns, who in 1985 took the well-trodden, wooded path down from Cane Hill to the busy railway line passing through Coulsdon in Surrey. And the longer you spend in the mental health business, the easier it is to accept that some forms of some mental illness zig-zag down the generations, their expression sometimes depending on interaction with external events or stressors but often arriving with a kind of random certainty. The operating system of these processes is the law of threes: some people will become mentally ill whatever happens to them; some may become mentally ill depending on what happens to them; and some will never become mentally ill whatever happens to them.
David Bowie probably hovered on the cusp of the first two groupings. The thread of
identity in him did not seem strong, leading to a self-image which was fluid and labile. Eschewing LSD because he felt his imagination was vivid enough without it, he used other drugs to manipulate his consciousness, in the same way that many sufferers from actual psychotic illness do, skilfully titrating their intake of cannabis, for example, to supplement doctor-prescribed drugs. In fact, he made a career out of not-fitting-in, which is often the basic, prodromal position of those who go on to develop schizophrenia at one of the three or four troubling peaks of development in the human lifespan, perhaps as a consequence of what David Cooper, 1970s anti-psychiatrist psychiatrist, called invalidation.
Again, clinical observation tells you that certain modes of thought as well as of being go with particular kinds of mental ill health. For example, people who develop depression and other forms of mood disorder tend to have divergent or lateral ways of thinking, characterised by a capacity to make instantaneous sideways links and associations between the now and the other. Depression, in a way, is what happens when this imaginative process goes into reverse, positive, affirming associations being replaced by a hotline to lurking terrors – and the sufferer becomes overwhelmed by the taste of what poet Thomas Moore called “the dark-flowing urn”.
The sometimes lethal torment of mental illness, whether psychotic or affective in the form of depression or bi-polar disorder, cannot, of itself, be said to have any compensatory advantages or to provide entry into insights not available to those who haven’t experienced it. That said, like any extreme form of suffering, it puts the normal, expected trials and losses that go with being human into perspective: those who have felt or believed their identity to be on the cliff-edge of annihilation are more likely to be able to act as the neutral witness (another Cooperian concept) to the suffering of others and to approach lesser problems calmly and pragmatically.
There are, in fact, numerous studies which confirm the empirical deduction through observation that creativity and mental illness are genetic partners, though the exact nature of their relationship remains elusive. A mega-study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry (2011; Kyaga et al) reveals convincing evidence that this is so and concludes that: “the parents and siblings of people with schizophrenia [were] significantly more likely to hold a creative profession compared with the control group”, as were those of people with bipolar affective disorder, though to a lesser degree. The authors go on to say that the fact that this likelihood was found to be the same among both maternal half-siblings and paternal half-siblings points to a genetic rather than environmental explanation. They posit that severe mental disorder may have persisted through evolution because a susceptibility to it, rather than the thing itself, brings “adaptive advantages” - which begs the question, addressed below, whether its elimination through genetic manipulation might also take out characteristics which have been of benefit to society.
These putative benefits seem speculative and remote compared with the costs of mental illness for the sufferer, relatives and the state. It inevitably seems only a matter of time – probably a couple of decades rather than years – before what is called inheritable genetic modification (IGM) is applied to mental disorder as it now is to much rarer conditions such as mitochondrial disease. Three-person IVF has now been approved by the UK parliament as a way of eliminating the latter and scientists in China have genetically modified human embryos in order to neutralise the gene which causes beta-thalassaemia.
A paper on this technique, published in May 2015 by sixteen Chinese scientists and entitled “CRISPR [“clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat] – Cas9 mediated gene editing in human tri-pronuclear zygotes”, refers to several “off-target edits”, a euphemism meaning that healthy genes were changed in the process, but any moral objections to this kind of science will be easily trumped once it acquires the momentum of inevitability. An observation by Dr Dusko Ilic, from the stem-cell science department of Kings College London (KCL), that “the idea of using this for designer babies is very far-fetched” is undermined by his conclusion that “the technology is too far off”, an equivocation which turns the potential of IGM from an ethical matter into a technical one.
The embrace or acceptance of suffering, which underlies moral objections to genetic modification, is a feeble force against the juggernaut of scientific inevitability, not least because of the huge profits which can be made from patenting and implementing tests and treatments for inheritable disorders. For example, John Hopkins University hopes to patent a genetic suicidality test in the belief that “the presence of alterations to a single gene could predict who will attempt suicide with 80% accuracy”. Once the assumption that the end of preventing harm justifies the means of genetic engineering becomes an automatic truth, the only boundary to the latter becomes feasibility rather than desirability.
Thus, Julian Savulescu, Professor of Practical Ethics at Oxford University, argues that the elimination of genes for aggression and other negative traits should be pursued to save humanity, and that would-be parents should eventually have a duty to allow such intervention on their embryos. No doubt, he might well include the tendency to form negative stereotypes, now traceable according to neuroscientists at University College, London (UCL) to activity in the anterior temporal lobe of the brain, as one such trait; or the genetic predisposition, posited recently in the Journal of Current Biology, to have a low income and be a victim of what is called social deprivation. Again, the counter-assertion by Gina Maranto, from the University of Miami, in an article entitled “False Inevitabilities” that “it’s fatuous to contend that all technologies must be used because they are developed” seems like raindrops on the sea of scientific hegemony.
The scope and reach of science, and its application have, of course, psychological or psycho-political roots since all human activity must have a mind behind it. Just as science must test psychology, so psychology must probe the preoccupations and bias of science. Purity, perfectibility and sameness are the distant goals of genetic manipulation and beyond even those is one-ness, the most primitive fantasy of all in which the infinite frustrations and tribulations of not-being-one are eliminated. Totalitarianism, whether in Nazi Germany, North Korea or the deathly monomania of fundamentalism, is the collective enactment of this wish which necessarily will visit extreme violence on those who would seek to thwart it.
Whereas such regimes impose sameness by force, pre-emptive genetic manipulation over time will edge towards generating it painlessly and invisibly. As mind becomes, not just coterminous, but synonymous with brain, criminality, a propensity for violence or hatred, sexual perversion, radicalism or contrariness, along with psychopathology in all its increasing forms will eventually be isolable and therefore within the range of elimination from our DNA. And underneath, the seeming paradox that desirable steps can lead to a hellish destination will remain unexamined.
Consciousness will be determined by science, the market’s loyal outrider. Creativity, eccentricity, non-conformity, an instinct for iconoclasm or subversion, and all their kindred impulses which lurk on the obverse of the status quo will be pre-emptively smoothed away. Yet maybe in among the Utopian fantasies of academics who should know better, there also lurks an unobserved truth – that saving humanity, as the Professor couches it, requires the counterweight of conflict, suffering, alienation, deviance and both intrapsychic and societal instability; and that the will to eliminate them necessarily drags in its wake a guarantee that they will be expressed eventually. If society wants what is good, it must also accommodate what is bad.