Much of the literature considering the etiology of mental disorders remains divided between the work of population health scientists who focus on environmental determinants such as trauma, past experience, and neighborhoods on one hand, and neurobiologists who focus on genetic pathways and intracellular processes on the other. These parallel lines of inquiry have left a gap in our understanding of the etiology of psychopathology. While the importance of both genes and environments as determinants of psychopathology is inarguable, the extant work that has attempted to understand gene-environment interactions in the production of psychopathology has been largely limited to investigations of statistical interactions from population data rather than work that has explored the mechanisms through which genes and environments may jointly produce pathology.
