The Meaning of a Schizophrenic Mouse

Johns Hopkins researchers have created a mouse model of schizophrenia, a psychiatric disorder that affects around one in 100 Americans.

They produced the schizophrenic mice by adding a gene identified in 2001 in a large, schizophrenia-prone Scottish family. The gene has subsequently been found in other families with high levels of mental illness.

According to the press release, mice with the gene demonstrate behaviors that "parallel the hyperactivity, smell defects and apathy observed in schizophrenia patients." They also display "characteristic defects in brain structure, including enlarged lateral ventricles," though these are less pronounced than in human schizophrenics "because more than one gene is required to trigger the clinical disease." Despite this, it's supposed to be an improvement over current mouse models "that rely on drugs that can only mimic the manifestations of schizophrenia."

I could point out here the extraordinary limitations of mouse models for mental illness, especially single gene-variant mouse models, though it's true they could help identify biological pathways that contribute to the disorder. I could note that drug-based models aren't necessarily a bad thing, inasmuch as they point to pathways, too. I could also say that, on the positive side, that the researchers have an appropriately progressive conception of the genetics involved, seeing them as one part of a complex interaction between organism and environment. And I certainly don't doubt that there are biological aspects of schizophrenia, that some people would suffer from the condition irrespective of their environment, and that developing treatments -- as this is intended to do -- would ease a great deal of suffering. Perhaps this will, in fact, be the crucial step in a path to therapeutic intervetion, and so I could at least acknowledge the possibility with hope and good cheer.

But to do so would require an engagement with these efforts in a way that obscured the more fundamental assumptions involved in the very direction and conduct of the research. And this research leaves me with a hollow, troubled feeling. I'm not sure how exactly to articulate it, but Marilynne Robinson, in an essay entitled "Facing Reality," comes close:

Antebellum doctors described an illness typical of enslaved people sold away from their families, which anyone can recognize as rage and grief. By medicalizing their condition, the culture was able to refuse the meaning of their suffering. I am afrai we also are forgetting that emotions signify, that they are much fuller of meaning than language, that they interpret the world to us and us to other people. Perhaps the reality we have made fills certain of us, and of our children, with rage and grief -- the tedium and meagerness of it, the meanness of it, the stain of fearfulness it leaves everywhere. It may be necessary to offer ourselves palliatives, but it is drastically wrong to offer or to accept a palliative as if it were a cure.

First Mouse Model Of Schizophrenia Developed [press release]

Note: I couldn't find the original study in PNAS, but will post link if I do. Contrary to the press release, this was not the first genetically modified schizophrenic mouse model. Another model, produced eighteen months ago, was modified to over-express dopamine in the striatum, a region of the brain.

Image: Pete S