Irving Isadore Gottesman (December 29, 1930 – June 29, 2016) was an American professor of psychology who devoted most of his career to the study of the genetics of schizophrenia.
He is known for researching schizophrenia in identical twins to document the contributions of genetics and the family, social, cultural, and economic environment to the onset, progress, and inter-generational transmission of the disorder.
Gottesman and co-researcher James Shields introduced the word epigenetics—the control of genes by biochemical signals modified by the environment from other parts of the genome—to the field of psychiatric genetics.
The books also include first-hand accounts of schizophrenic patients and relatives tending to them, giving an insight into jumbled thoughts, the disorder's primary symptom.
After leaving school, Gottesman joined the United States Navy, where he was given a scholarship and the rank of midshipman, and was assigned to the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
In his Twin Cities MMPI study, part of his Ph.D. thesis, Gottesman found high levels of inheritance in the scales related to schizophrenia, depression, anti-social personality disorder, and social introversion.
[3] The threshold model hypothesized that both genetic and environmental risks combined to produce schizophrenia, and pushed an individual into a diagnosable condition when their influence grew strong enough.
[4] The researchers showed identical twins were more likely to either have or not have schizophrenia together, concluding the disorder was the "outcome of a genetically determined developmental predisposition".
[4] Endophenotypes have been interpreted as a link between genes and the final behavior, acted on by the environment and chance elements, with biochemical and epigenetic influences changing the genome but not being passed on to children.
[15] The researchers had hypothesized that schizoida in a twin was how a schizophrenia carrier gene, one in a non-schizophrenic still passing on a genetic risk, expressed itself.
They stated that a review by Cathy Spatz Widom and the studies she cited had missed an element: children maltreated in families might have been targets because their genes might have influenced them into committing antisocial acts and attracting such treatment from parents.
[18] Gottesman was one of the presenters at the 1995 conference at the Aspen Institute in Maryland on how strongly genes controlled a person's leaning toward violence and crime.
The conference, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was contentious, with detractors arguing that such studies would lead to minority groups, more likely to be criminals because they had lower social status or were poor, being targeted with gene therapy for violence.
Gottesman testified that genes influenced IQ, but only in conjunction with elements such as schooling, money, and nutritious food from childhood onwards.
[21] Gottesman emphasized that genetics influences patients' behavior in concert with the family, social, economic, and cultural contexts.
Case summaries were prepared by the Scandinavian psychiatrist Erick Essen-Moller, and these were sent, with data on identical-or-fraternal-twin status and diagnosis-of-schizophrenia removed, to six judges from the U.S., U.K. and Japan.
[25] Its last chapters put the results in the context of existing studies, and presented a new theory and model to explain the causes and continuance of the disorder.
[28] The environmental aspects the researchers checked drew on existing literature, and multiple judgments were pooled to both compare and mutually cancel differing criteria for diagnosing schizophrenia.
[30] Family, adoption and twin studies were investigated to determine the ways vulnerability to the disorder changed with genetic similarity to the patient.
Contextual elements such as birth problems and stressful incidents were also analyzed to help the authors build a combined model to explain the disorder.
The researchers investigated neuroanatomy, and specifically the neurotransmitter dopamine, as a possible route by which genes influence the functioning of the brain to produce the symptoms of the disorder.
[29] The authors investigated autism and psychiatric disorders among children, but found little relation to adult schizophrenia or genetic influence.
A chapter was devoted to social issues, violence, illnesses, death rates, sexual aspects, and the ability to father or bear children affecting schizophrenics.
[29] Schizophrenia Genesis: The Origins of Madness, written in 1991, won the William James award from the American Psychological Association.
[23][34] The book also contains accounts of schizophrenics, with an artist depicting own suffering, saying, "I know ... it is craziness when every laugh is about me ... newspapers suddenly contain cures ... sparkles of light are demon eyes.
[35] A chapter was devoted to criteria for determining schizophrenia, with Gottesman preferring those developed by Bleuler to those in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (version III-R), the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-9) and Kurt Schneider’s method.
Gottesman mentioned a disparity in schizophrenia diagnosis after World War II across the Atlantic, when U.S. psychiatric diagnoses quadrupled those of British psychiatrists.
[34] The book examines the problems caused by schizophrenia for relatives of patients and for society at large, larger-scale ones exemplified by the eugenics policies of states such as Nazi Germany.
[36] Newer methods of behavioral genetics being researched at the time of publication, such as linkage analysis which used the likelihood of neighboring genes being inherited together, were not covered.