Can smoking effect your mental health? Dr Robyn Wootton, a genetic epidemiologist studying mental illness talks about her research, art, twins, and why she’s passionate about genetics.
“In the UK, if your car breaks down, you can get help within 60 minutes. When your mind breaks down, it can take 18 months.” There have been multiple examples of this notion that have stuck with me over the years. Mental illness affects 1 in 4 people every year and the prevalence of mental illness is rising at dramatic rates. Having experienced mental health problems myself and having seen close friends really struggle with recurrent mental illness, I became all too aware of how little we can do when someone is really suffering. This lack of funding, both into research and into services has made me frustrated and passionate about trying to help, leading me to become a genetic epidemiologist studying mental illness.
My PhD focused on the genetics of positive mental health (such as happiness, trust, gratitude and optimism) by studying twins and now I’m looking at the association between tobacco/alcohol and mental illness. This year, I got involved in Creative Reactions, which explores the relationships between science and art. The artist I was paired with, Chris Bowles, managed to see connections between my work that I had never noticed before.
Chris noticed the many forms of symmetry (e.g. in the double helix, in pairs of chromosomes, in identical twins etc.) and was particularly interested in how two identical twins, who share 100% of their genetic material, can be discordant for mental illness. That is to say, one twin gets depression and the other doesn’t. You can see this in the two different images Chris has placed side by side. Both have the same double helix in the background, however one looks chaotic and the other more clear. I see this as the same genetics producing different outcomes in different individuals. And of course, these different outcomes are the result of different environments we are exposed to, represented as cigarette smoke throughout the images.
Smoking is much more prevalent amongst individuals with depression and schizophrenia than the general population. This was thought to be due to people with depression and schizophrenia smoking more in order to alleviate their symptoms. But recent research suggests that smoking can also increase your risk of developing depression and schizophrenia due to lasting changes to the brain. This is further evidence that we need to help individuals stop smoking both because of detrimental effects on mental health as well as physical health.
I’m using the method of Mendelian randomisation (MR) to look at whether cigarette smoking really does increases your risk of developing schizophrenia and depression. MR uses genetic variants that make an individual more susceptible to take up smoking. The idea is that these genetic variants are inherited randomly at conception and hence are kind of like a randomised control trial. They should be inherited independently of other lifestyle factors (e.g. education, alcohol consumption etc.) and your genes are fixed for your lifetime and therefore having mental illness cannot go back in time and change the genes you were born with. The University of Bristol has a world leading MRC funded research centre (the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit) where current MR methods are being developed.
I didn’t ever think it was possible to have a career combining so many different things that I was interested in. But if I could go back in time, then I would tell myself to get involved with research earlier on. Especially at Bristol, there are lots of opportunities for undergraduates to help with conducting research experiments. Don’t be afraid to speak to academics.
Don’t be afraid to be passionate about something. During my undergrad, I was always going on about how fascinating I thought genetics was. Someone on my course met an academic who studied genetics of mental illness and told me about her. This turned out to be Dr Claire Haworth, my PhD supervisor. I would never have met her and done a PhD if I hadn’t of banged on all the time about how much I loved genetics!
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Dr Robyn Wootton is a senior research associate in the School of Psychological Science and part of the Tobacco and Alcohol research group (TARG), who conduct research into the psychological and biological factors underlying health behaviours.