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    Holding blame at bay? 'Gene talk' in family members’ accounts of schizophrenia aetiology

    Callard, Felicity and Rose, D. and Hanif, E-L. and Quigley, J. and Greenwood, K. and Wykes, T. (2012) Holding blame at bay? 'Gene talk' in family members’ accounts of schizophrenia aetiology. BioSocieties 7 (3), pp. 273-293. ISSN 1745-8552.

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    Abstract

    We provide the first detailed analysis of how, for what purposes and with what consequences people related to someone with a diagnosis of schizophrenia use ‘gene talk’. The article analyses findings from a qualitative interview study conducted in London and involving 19 participants (mostly women). We transcribed the interviews verbatim and analysed them using grounded theory methods. We analyse how and for what purposes participants mobilized ‘gene talk’ in their affectively freighted encounter with an unknown interviewer. Gene talk served to (re)position blame and guilt, and was simultaneously used imaginatively to forge family history narratives. Family members used ‘gene talk’ to recruit forebears with no psychiatric diagnosis into a family history of mental illness, and presented the origins of the diagnosed family member's schizophrenia as lying temporally before, and hence beyond the agency of the immediate family. Gene talk was also used in attempts to dislodge the distressing figure of the schizophrenia-inducing mother. ‘Gene talk’, however, ultimately displaced, rather than resolved, the (self-)blame of many family members, particularly mothers. Our article challenges the commonly expressed view that genetic accounts will absolve family members’ sense of (self-)blame in relation to their relative's/relatives’ diagnosis.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): schizophrenia, genetics, inheritance, family, mothers, emotion
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
    Research Centres and Institutes: Social Research, Birkbeck Institute for (BISR)
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 03 Jul 2012 11:35
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:37
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/20414

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