Table III.

Key messages to convey to patients during a psychiatric genetic counselling appointment

Key messages to convey in psychiatric genetic counseling
Genetic factors work together with environmental factors (or our experiences) to contribute to the development of a mental illness.
We cannot control the genes that we pass along to our children.
We all have some genetic vulnerability to mental illness62, but we vary in how much.
Those with higher genetic vulnerability to mental illness can thrive under the right circumstances.63
Mental illness is not genetically determined. Indeed there is no single factor that is necessary and sufficient to cause someone to develop a psychiatric disorder (see Box 1 for more discussion).
We do not inherit mental illness itself, but we can inherit a vulnerability to mental illness.
There are things that we can do to protect mental health: sleep, nutrition, exercise, social support, finding effective ways to manage stress, avoiding street drugs35–38, but there is no such thing as “perfect parenting” and we cannot definitively prevent mental illness.
Stress is a subjective experience that is: a) not always negative in valence (e.g. a planned and wanted pregnancy can still be stressful), and b) need not be classifiable as trauma to contribute to mental illness vulnerability.
Mental illness is not a moral failing, and it is not anyone’s fault.