Do you have the resiliency gene? Have you heard about it?

How do you respond to adversity? Do you seem to “spin” everything in a positive way? Perhaps your genetics allow you this resilience. Tapping the Mood Gene

A report in the current issue of Science looks at the effects of stressful events in early adulthood ? and the way that responses to them are mediated by a single gene, called 5-HTT. This same gene was in the news in the 1990’s, when its variant forms, long and short, were discovered. The gene makes a protein that modifies nerve cells’ use of serotonin, a chemical messenger important in the regulation of mood. The short version of the gene was linked (if weakly) to neuroticism, as a personality trait ? the news media called 5-HTT the “Woody Allen gene.”

The long variant of the gene seems to confer emotional resilience. The new study, headed by behavioral geneticists from King’s College, London, looked at developmental data on 847 New Zealanders who had been followed from ages 3 to 26. In young men and women with two long genes, stress did not produce depression. It made no difference whether the subjects had been mistreated severely in early childhood, nor whether they had later encountered deaths in the family, ill health or financial losses. But among subjects with one or two short genes, adversity, whether early or recent, led to an increase in depression at age 26.

The study is important because it bears on the nature of depression, a subject about which our culture is ambivalent. Public health campaigns call depression a disabling illness. But in memoirs and novels, it retains a romantic cast ? as if mood disorder were not an illness but a character trait conferring a special emotional sensitivity. A survey last month in The Journal of the American Medical Association shows that general practitioners still undertreat depression in a way that would be scandalous if lung or liver disease were at stake. Whether depression should have full status as a physical disease in health insurance coverage or as a workplace disability remains a matter of public debate.

At first glance, the new genetic finding makes depression look like an aspect of normal temperament. After all, 70 percent of us have at least one short 5-HTT gene, and vulnerability to depression is normal. But the study also meshes with the prevailing model of mood disorder, in which depression is every inch an illness. According to theory, most depression arises from an interaction of genes and experience. In the predisposed, early trauma and subsequent adversity lead to depressive symptoms and subtle changes in the brain. Chronic depression produces marked changes. Particular brain regions begin to shrink or show structural disorganization. Resilience factors ? perhaps including the protein produced by the 5-HTT gene ? mitigate that damage or allow for repair.

So would you rather be resilient or become “normally” depressed. Which confers a greater advantage in life? Will this research provide us the tools to all become resilient? And will that be good?

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