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Now There are Genetic Counselors for Mental Illness
ADAPT is one of the first clinics in the world to provide psychiatric genetic counseling to people with a family history of mental illness
Victoria Maxwell was no stranger to mental illness when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, anxiety, and psychosis at age 25. Her mother had bipolar depression, and when Maxwell was a child she remembers her mom as anxious and depressed, sometimes to the point of feeling suicidal. “I walked around on eggshells so I didn’t set my mother off,” she says. Soon after Maxwell received her own diagnosis, she was hospitalized for running down the street naked during a period of psychosis. She was eventually hospitalized three more times, and says she struggled to come to terms with the fact that she developed a mental illness like her mother. “When I was hospitalized, I really didn’t accept the illness,” she says. “It took almost five years for me to accept it.”
Maxwell, now 52, created a one-person show about her experience titled That’s Just Crazy Talk — A Story About Family, Secrets, and Stigma. She was performing her show at a research conference when she was introduced to Dr. Jehannine Austin, a genetic counselor and the founder of the ADAPT Clinic at the B.C. Women’s Hospital and Health Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia. The ADAPT Clinic is the first clinic in the world to provide psychiatric genetic counseling to people living with a diagnosis of mental illness, or people who believe they are at risk for one.
Nearly one in five adults in the United States lives with a mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Although there is no genetic test that can diagnose or predict a person’s risk for mental disease, researchers acknowledge that mental health conditions are driven by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. People with a family history of mental illness may wonder if they are destined to inherit the same one they’ve watched a parent or sibling live with, or if it will show up in their children down the line. Psychiatric genetic counseling is meant to help people navigate that uncertainty.
Austin has spent the last 16 years focused on psychiatric genetic counseling, which was…
