Environmental Sources of Variability

Abstract

The size and burden of mental illness should ideally prompt a strategy of preemption and early intervention. Large interindividual variability points to the opportunity and necessity of precision prevention. On the neuroscientific side, this leads to the question of brain mechanisms of risk and resilience for these common and disabling disorders. The social environment plays an especially important role in risk, but the impact on the brain is just coming into focus. In this presentation, we review emerging evidence that combines epidemiology, social psychology and neuroscience to identify neural mechanisms of variable interindividual response to social risk factors for mental illness.