DOES BAD PARENTING CAUSE MENTAL ILLNESS?

by Helen Borel, RN,MFA,PhD

The Baby Monkey Experiment
Decades ago, psychiatric scientists performed a sad experiment.  They set up two separate
rooms into each of which they introduced an infant monkey.  Only one object, for each of
the infant monkeys to cling to, was installed in each room.

In one otherwise bare empty room, stood a big, flimsy-looking, black wire “mother”
(a construct like a “head” with a “body”, loosely made of metal webbing).

In the second also bare empty room, soft white terrycloth toweling completely covered
a similar “wire mother”.

Both the cold metal and terrycloth “mothers” had nippled bottles of milk attached to the
“body” areas.

The results of this cruel experiment were predictable by any nonscientist with common
sense.  The infant simian placed with the “terrycloth mother” drank the milk, cuddled
with the “mother,” and thrived.  The infant simian abandoned by the heartless “scientists”
with the cold, “wire mother” shriveled emotionally and developed schizophrenia-like
symptoms.
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The Myth of the “Schizophrenogenic Mother”
Caution: Of course, this ethically-questionable “experiment” took place in an era when the,
now discredited, concept of a so-called “schizophrenogenic mother” was rife in psychiatric
circles.  The idea, that a mother alternating, warm “come-to-me-I-love-you” messages with
cold “get-away-from-me, I’ve-no-feeling-for-you” messages confused her child with
painful inconsistency thereby precipitating schizophrenia, though false, damaged the lives
of these mothers on top of the burden they had to bear of seeing their beloved children
descend into worsening psychosis.

Due to this faulty notion, too many mothers of severely ill schizophrenics, so mislabeled,
blamed, and baffled by befuddled psychiatrists, were themselves emotionally wounded while 
trying to help their psychotic young adult children who were floundering in a sea of voices
and visions now known to be generated by cerebral pathology.

The Anatomy and Physiology of Major Mental Disorders
The lesson here: Many psychiatric illnesses are genetic, especially psychotic conditions like
bipolar disorder (swings between mania and depression), schizophrenia, and severe chronic
depression with delusions.

Other conditions, like personalities warped by childhood traumas, might be attributable to
actions of adult miscreants toward the developing child.

However, conditions like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Attention Deficit Hyper-
activity Disorder (ADHD), Asperger’s syndrome, Autism, even Shyness, Excessive Anxiety,
and uncontrollable Anger Outbursts as in Borderline patients are all attributable to some
cerebral malfunction, whether anomalous brain anatomy (some distorted or absent key
brain tissue) or disordered brain chemistry (an imbalance between feel-good neurochemicals
and mood-lowering or mood-agitating neurochemicals).  Both of the latter anatomical and/or
physiologic disruptions, which interact with each other to produce disordered thoughts and
repetitive strange and dysfunctional behaviors, are known to be etiologic (causative) of
psychiatric illnesses.  Not mothers!

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(c) Copyright 2017 Dr. Helen Borel. All rights reserved.