The press release is misleading. Indeed, press releases about scientific studies are almost always misleading, which is why they are not the preferred source for stories about new scientific findings.
I participate most weeks during the United States school year in a "journal club" about human behavior genetics. The meetings include researchers who research genetic influences on depression and other mental disorders. It has been known for a LONG time that depression runs in families in a way that demonstrates genetic influence on depression. (In other words, adoption studies and twin studies, and especially studies on the rare monozygotic twins who are brought in separate households, make clear that genetic similarity of human individuals is linked to their similarity in risk for depression.) It has also been known for a LONG time that environmental influences, including the vague set of influences called "stress," matter for development of depression, so sometimes monozygotic ("identical") twins are discordant for depression, because they have different life experiences.
What the press release is about, and what scientists have been trying to figure out during my adult life, is what the nature of genetic influences on depression might be. It has also been known for the better of a decade, and suspected much earlier by the more astute researchers on human behavior genetics, that MANY genes influence any one human behavior trait of interest. Depression is SURELY, as we can now say by the results of massive genome-wide association studies (GWASs), influenced by hundreds of genes, each of which has only a small effect on risk. So the press release reports that an early finding that was expected to show that one gene variant had a lot to do with developing depressing has rather shown that that gene variant, as is true of all other gene variants, sometimes has no detectable effect on a patient's having depression or not.
The human mood regulation system is just that, a SYSTEM, so perturbations of many different aspects of the system can cause clinical signs that are identified as "depression." What helps depression, in general, is a both-and approach of prescribed medicine under the supervision of a physician and talk therapy provided by a psychotherapist. Most patients these days with diagnosed depressed do MUCH better than patients did a generation ago. Some patients are helped a lot by one or another of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), and some are not helped by those medicines at all. And that's all because depression is a clinical condition with a diverse set of underlying biochemical causes, as we know for sure from GWAS studies.
Further study of genetic relationships to depression should help develop new drugs that help some patients who are not helped by current drugs or that help patients who are already helped by existing drugs but with fewer side effects. But we are NOWHERE near being able to use genetic test results to decide which drug to use first: patients have to talk to their doctors about how they are feeling as they undergo treatment. Your best bet for finding good treatment if you feel depressed is to find out what has helped a NEAR relative who has also suffered depression.
The thread-opening link here is a blog post by an active researcher on the topic. The blog post links to a recent paper from the Review of Educational Research[1] by a more senior researcher with more details. I have met both of these researchers at professional conferences.
Thank you very much to all for the detailed comments. I appreciate you keeping advice simple enough for someone like me, who decades ago counted as a "power user" of PCs, but who has no particular technical training or computer-related work experience. I will have to digest some of this advice for women (they are mostly women in the local group) who are barely comfortable using Facebook. And I'll pass on other tips to the women and men who have actual technical backgrounds and will be implementing the different online projects of the local group.
Advice that especially fits our situation is having an appropriate level of security for an intentionally PUBLIC organization whose members will be identifiable by multiple in-person activities in public places over the next few years. We are not afraid to be known as people who support the cause that we support. We are resolutely sticking to peaceful, legal means to reach our goals. Many group members are VERY wary of new group members--plenty of them are wary of me--so we will have to build mutual trust as we build mutual communication and public-facing communication. I like mz's advice to remind members that anything they say in an online group--even in our internal online groups for members only--might show up in mass media or in propaganda spread by opponents, so I try to model careful speaking and writing.
I'll link here to a document about the bad-case scenario of living under an actual dictatorship with a secret police force that kills political opponents. That's something I've actually done (in Taiwan, in the 1980s). The good news is that nonviolent popular movements can even overthrow dictators and establish democratic republics with full protection of civil liberties. That takes mental toughness, but it can be done. I've seen it done. You may be inspired by the document linked here and the other documents (in numerous languages) posted at the same website.
Since you have a lot of women, I will suggest that you explicitly instruct them to be careful about talking about other people in their lives in identifiable terms. Men tend to invest their identity in their work. Women tend to invest their identity in their relationships. Telling anecdotes about "My sister/boss/mother/daughter/son/husband" is potentially putting those people at risk. Encourage them to use vaguer terminology such as 'someone I know'; 'a relative'; 'an acquaintance'; 'a friend of a friend.'
Women are incredibly prone to talking about other people in terms that they don't think is problematic and in terms that they think is anonymous enough for the internet, but really is not ("my sister" instead of "sister's name" -- but it is possible to identify your sister). This is a habit they need to break if they value the welfare of these other people.
Edit: Since this is getting down votes, I will add that if you think they won't listen to a man saying this, I will be happy to blog about it and you can give them the link. Perhaps it will be more palatable coming from a woman.
Maybe some of the onlookers don't know that you have long identified yourself as a woman here. As I recall, we (you and I) eventually figured out that we first "met" on an online community before Hacker News was founded.
Oh, no doubt. The offer to do a blogpost still stands. I can include the pertinent info in a piece I have been planning for some time about information security online for women.
Thanks especially for items 8 through 15, which some people forget. Part of what I hope happens where I live is that 13 happens in a big way, and the overall inclusive movement becomes broader and broader as different specialized local groups network with one another and with a variety of national groups.
The patient's age being twenty-one may have made a difference in this happy news story. My dad had a slip and fall on ice at age seventy-two that left him paralyzed from the chin down until he died six years later. He had had a similar injury from a car crash (back when cars didn't have seat belts) at age eighteen, from which he recovered fully (although he wasn't so paralyzed from the first injury). So when he had his second injury, he at first thought he would also recover from that injury. Maybe because the second injury aggravated damage to his spine still remaining from his first injury, or maybe just because he was a lot older when injured the second time, he never recovered much at all from the second injury. His experience reminds me how many other people in a family are affected by spinal cord injuries, and thus how important it is to find better treatments for them.
So it's hard to say how wide a range of patients will be treatable with the new technique, but that's what medical research is for: to find out what helps for which patients. I hope further research continues on this and other treatments for spinal cord injuries.
This has been anticipated for a while (I recall posting comments about this years ago) as multiply antibiotic-resistant microbes have been spreading in India, where the woman mentioned in the article kindly submitted here had traveled.
a decent home (2000 sq ft, good neighborhood, reasonable commute)
We have lived for more than a decade with four children in a house with fewer finished square feet of floor space. I'm curious about what "good neighborhood" means here, because my children can walk or bicycle all over the place, without fear of mishap, and the local public schools here draw people from all over the country. "Reasonable commute" is also a term I'd like to understand better in this context. How tied to location is the employment you each have, if you are able to move out of state?
I have to think that it's possible for middle-class people like my family (at a lower income level, currently, than what you self-report) to live in cities, because we do. Most of our work happens to be in outer-ring suburbs, so "reasonable commute" puts us there, but other people with work nearer into the center of the metropolitan area can live affordably further in.
Disclosure: we live in an other ring suburb of Minneapolis, just outside the beltway freeway around the Twin Cities, and barely within reach of the bus system. My wife and my third son bike-commute often, year-round.
Summer 2008, and widely criticized from then to now. I wonder if a professor of English can ever have the same perspective as a professor of biology or a professor of mathematics. I don't think he has made the case that higher education that can properly be called "elite" is actually disadvantageous.
I participate most weeks during the United States school year in a "journal club" about human behavior genetics. The meetings include researchers who research genetic influences on depression and other mental disorders. It has been known for a LONG time that depression runs in families in a way that demonstrates genetic influence on depression. (In other words, adoption studies and twin studies, and especially studies on the rare monozygotic twins who are brought in separate households, make clear that genetic similarity of human individuals is linked to their similarity in risk for depression.) It has also been known for a LONG time that environmental influences, including the vague set of influences called "stress," matter for development of depression, so sometimes monozygotic ("identical") twins are discordant for depression, because they have different life experiences.
What the press release is about, and what scientists have been trying to figure out during my adult life, is what the nature of genetic influences on depression might be. It has also been known for the better of a decade, and suspected much earlier by the more astute researchers on human behavior genetics, that MANY genes influence any one human behavior trait of interest. Depression is SURELY, as we can now say by the results of massive genome-wide association studies (GWASs), influenced by hundreds of genes, each of which has only a small effect on risk. So the press release reports that an early finding that was expected to show that one gene variant had a lot to do with developing depressing has rather shown that that gene variant, as is true of all other gene variants, sometimes has no detectable effect on a patient's having depression or not.
The human mood regulation system is just that, a SYSTEM, so perturbations of many different aspects of the system can cause clinical signs that are identified as "depression." What helps depression, in general, is a both-and approach of prescribed medicine under the supervision of a physician and talk therapy provided by a psychotherapist. Most patients these days with diagnosed depressed do MUCH better than patients did a generation ago. Some patients are helped a lot by one or another of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), and some are not helped by those medicines at all. And that's all because depression is a clinical condition with a diverse set of underlying biochemical causes, as we know for sure from GWAS studies.
Further study of genetic relationships to depression should help develop new drugs that help some patients who are not helped by current drugs or that help patients who are already helped by existing drugs but with fewer side effects. But we are NOWHERE near being able to use genetic test results to decide which drug to use first: patients have to talk to their doctors about how they are feeling as they undergo treatment. Your best bet for finding good treatment if you feel depressed is to find out what has helped a NEAR relative who has also suffered depression.