Anxiety Disorders Discoverable by Blood Test

Tomer Yaffe writes to tell us that researchers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem have discovered a technique to diagnose anxiety disorders with a simple blood test. From the article: "The researchers hope that the anxiety blood test will soon make its way into hospitals and E.R. rooms and give doctors and psychiatrists a quick and precise tool for examining, and eventually treating, these disorders." The team has also set their sights on depression, hoping for a similar technique to detect these types of disorders as well.

Comments

Re:As a psych student

[LeonGeeste]

"Mental illness" is not generally not "illness" in any meaningful sense of the word. First, some background. In economics, choices are said to be based upon a person's preferences and his constraints. Preferences are what you want, in the order you want them; constraints are anything that stops you from getting what you really want. Normal illnesses can be described purely as constraints. No matter what you want, you can't will yourself to stop sneezing, or de-AIDS yourself, for example. So those are constraints. To understand the difference, you can apply the "gun-to-the-head" test. Ask: if you pointed a gun at the person and credibly told him you would kill him if he didn't stop, and he still couldn't, it's a constraint. If he could, it's a preference.

Mental illnesses are generally not constraints, but preferences. ADD doesn't need constraints to explain it: the person just has a high preference for variety and a low preference for monotony. A person who habitually steals doesn't have kleptomania; he just likes stealing. You could stop him with a gun.

Now, let's talk about this blood test. What does it prove? If we could tell who was a Catholic by a blood test, would that mean Catholicism is a mental illness? No, the "anxiety" label is a moral judgment. Anxiety is "bad", so it must be attributable to something physiological; no rational person would think that way, right? In exactly the same way, homosexuality was an "illness" because of a moral judgment. Would the discovery of a "gay gene" change this? If you need a better example, think about delusions. You're said to have the mental illness of delusions if you hold systematically biased beliefs. Yet the same standard specifically excludes religion. Now, whatever religion you are, you must believe some other religion's views are systematically biased. But they're arbitrarily excluded, because psychiatrists don't want to offend religious people. When attitudes change, so does what counts as a delusion, just as homosexuality got lobbed of the list.

Just my two cents.