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The promise of psychiatric enviromics

Department of Mental Hygiene, School of Hygiene and Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

Correspondence: E-mail: janthony{at}jhu.edu

Declaration of interest None. Funding detailed in Acknowledgements.

ABSTRACT

Background The human genome dwells within environment, determines environment and its expression is shaped by environment.

Aims To introduce ‘psychiatric enviromics’ as a complement to human genomics and proteomics as applied to mental health.

Method Selective literature review and synthesis.

Results and conclusions Psychiatric enviromics can be planned to sustain the search for specific environments or environmental processes and conditions that promote mental health and reduce the occurrence of psychiatric disturbances. Subsets of the psychiatric envirome will be discovered to have functional importance precisely because specific environmental conditions or processes will reduce, amplify or otherwise modulate the expression of specific genes or multiple gene interactions at identifiable periods of life-span development. Other salubrious environmental conditions and processes will have funtional importance but lack specificity of action with respect to gene expression. An international collaboration in the form of a review of evidence is proposed as a starting point for ‘psychiatric enviromics’.

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