Multi-omics analysis identifies mitochondrial pathways associated with anxiety-related behavior, 2019, Hovatta et al

Open access at https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1008358

 

Basic biology is highly conserved so most of what we know about the behaviour of genes has come from animal studies, including fruit flies and planarian worms so it may have relevance to humans.

As it stands, psychology treats anxiety as an emotional problem - healthy stress system not working because of wrong thoughts that can be fixed by changing thoughts with CBT whereas I believe that many people with anxiety disorders have a faulty stress system which reacts badly to a stress level that a healthy system could cope with.

If your system is broken then any psychological therapy should be tailored to that not just CBT which assumes that you are doing something wrong. It should be treated as an illness in the same way as coeliac disease, say, where people are not blamed and a way is found to deal with a broken system.

 

It sounds a lot more likely that what we commonly refer to as anxiety is a range of biological and psychological processes but that we cannot tell them apart, even in cases of zero psychological involvement. We know for a fact that purely physiological processes can cause behavioral changes indistinguishable from the definition of psychologically-induced anxiety, from brain tumors to caffeine overdose.

We cannot test for anxiety and only have vague definitions of it. Claims about anxiety should be moderated with that in mind. Because if we follow the logic that ME does not exist because we cannot test for it, then anxiety does not exist either. Which is not a true statement. There is too much uncertainty and vague, hollow models about indeterminate concepts are not at all helpful.

The same can be said of depression. We only have a vague definition for it and no means to test for it. Arbitrary double standards are not the way to solve complex problems, especially when it leads to paradoxes like "this disease cannot be real since we cannot test for it therefore it must only and strictly be this vague, indeterminate concept we cannot test for and is superficially indistinguishable from other unrelated health problems".