Mental illness and familial influences | Letters

We seem to find it extraordinarily difficult as a society to hold a mid-point between “You have a physical illness, so your distress is real and no one is to blame for it” and “Your difficulties are imaginary or your or someone else’s fault, and you ought to pull yourself together”. Recent debates about mental distress have illustrated this (Letters, 14 March). Let us be clear that claims about established genetic or biochemical causation for mental distress are, as