Childhood trauma is not necessarily a prophecy of doom, because some children are resilient or because later experiences help to restore mental health.

Childhood trauma is not necessarily a prophecy of doom, because some children are resilient or because later experiences help to restore mental health.

If we are to believe the evidence from clinical trials there are many effective pharmacological and psychological treatments for mental illness. Epidemiological data, on the other hand, says otherwise.

At the population level, making the world more just and less unequal, while trying to figure out the toxic aspects of the urban environmental will probably help prevent a lot of psychosis.

At the individual level, if we can identify the psychological mechanisms linking adverse environments to psychosis (and there has been a lot of progress with this despite minimal funding) we should be able to devise more effective interventions for those who are already ill.

The only way you can estimate environmental influences is by measuring them.

There is also evidence from epidemiological studies that psychotic-like experiences are much more common than has hitherto been thought (with about 10% of the population affected) and that these experiences exist on continua with healthy or 'normal' functioning: instead of the world falling into two groups (the psychotic and the non-psychotic) people vary in their disposition to psychosis and only a minority of people who have these experiences require or seek help.