Bullying, as it turns out, can literally make your brain change for the worse.   This is how bullies extract their toll on the bullied forever…

The Brain: The Switches That Can Turn Mental Illness On and Off

This month’s column is a tale of two rats. One rat got lots of attention from its mother when it was young; she licked its fur many times a day. The other rat had a different experience. Its mother hardly licked its fur at all. The two rats grew up and turned out to be very different. The neglected rat was easily startled by noises. It was reluctant to explore new places. When it experienced stress, it churned out lots of hormones. Meanwhile, the rat that had gotten more attention from its mother was not so easily startled, was more curious, and did not suffer surges of stress hormones.

The same basic tale has repeated itself hundreds of times in a number of labs. The experiences rats had when they were young altered their behavior as adults. We all intuit that this holds true for people, too, if you replace fur-licking with school, television, family troubles, and all the other experiences that children have. But there’s a major puzzle lurking underneath this seemingly obvious fact of life. Our brains develop according to a recipe encoded in our genes. Each of our brain cells contains the same set of genes we were born with and uses those genes to build proteins and other molecules throughout its life. The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work.

Neuroscientists are now mapping that mechanism…

This is interesting on a number of accounts.   Firstly, as a gay man, it concerns me how the question of nature verses nurture is dealt with, as it has been a trip point in the culture war for decades now.   And as it seems to be turning out more and more, it’s a combination of both.   The story here is that genes may say one thing, but the effects of the environment, the physical environment, you grow up in, can overrule them all the same…

Two families of molecules perform that kind of genetic regulation. One family consists of methyl groups, molecular caps made of carbon and hydrogen. A string of methyl groups attached to a gene can prevent a cell from reading its DNA sequence. As a result, the cell can’t produce proteins or other molecules from that particular gene. The other family is made up of coiling proteins, molecules that wrap DNA into spools. By tightening the spools, these proteins can hide certain genes; by relaxing the spools, they can allow genes to become active.

How this plays out in terms of one’s sexual orientation fascinated me less then this…

…the influence of environment doesn’t end with childhood. Recent work indicates that adult experiences can also rearrange epigenetic marks in the brain and thereby change our behavior. Depression, for example, may be in many ways an epigenetic disease. Several groups of scientists have mimicked human depression in mice by pitting the animals against each other. If a mouse loses a series of fights against dominant rivals, its personality shifts. It shies away from contact with other mice and moves around less. When the mice are given access to a machine that lets them administer cocaine to themselves, the defeated mice take more of it.

Something, probably my body’s low tolerance to intoxicants, has kept me thankfully clear of addiction.   But I know its temptations.   There are days when I think if I could only drug myself out my my misery, life would be so much better.   But my body simply won’t let me do that.   I have no escape.   Well…I have one.   But it’s one I’ve not reached for.   So far.

I have the job of my dreams.   A house of my own I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I’d have.   My dream come true car.   And I am miserable.   Single, lonely and miserable.   If you don’t have love, nothing else matters.   You can be rich.   You can be living in the lap of luxury, and if you have no one, you have nothing and you know it.   You will always know it.   And at some level I have always known my brain was stacked against me in that struggle.

I was brutalized in grade school.   It was only   by shear luck that I lived in a tiny neighborhood that was diverted to this little expansion high school in a well to do neighborhood and away from my tormentors that allowed me to have at least a good final three years of grade school.   Woodward was paradise compared to my Jr. High School years and my elementary school years were only slightly less brutal.   When I wasn’t getting beaten up by the other kids, I was getting emotionally battered by the teachers, nearly all of whom dumped me in the problem child category, simply because mom was a single divorced mother.   The few in those days who actually took an interest in me and gave me a chance to learn have always had my eternal gratitude.

Woodward, I have said time and again, was paradise…absolutely the best years of my school life.   But even paradise could not undo the damage.   It wasn’t until my senior year that I finally started peeking out of the shell my tormentors had locked me into.   And by then it was, really, too late to start figuring out that dating and mating thing.   And besides, I was a gay kid, and it was 1971.

And I’m 57 now, and still single, and if anything surprises me it’s that I’m still alive.   I really shouldn’t be.   I honestly don’t know why I am still alive.   It’s your own fault Bruce.   We had to do it to you.   You were so weird we had to.   It’s your own fault Bruce.   You need to get out more.   Friends don’t help friends find a lover, they rub it in that it’s their own fault.   People who look like that, want people who look like that.   The more things change, the more they stay the same.   Why am I still here?

[Edited a tad…]