Shared Relations: Trauma and Kinship in the Afterlife of Death

Homeorhesis: envisaging the logic of life trajectories in molecular research on trauma and its effects

What sets someone on a life trajectory? This question is at the heart of studies of 21st-century neurosciences that build on scientific models developed over the last 150 years that attempt to link psychopathology risk and human development. Historically, this research has documented persistent effects of singular, negative life experiences on people's subsequent development. More recently, studies have documented neuromolecular effects of early life adversity on life trajectories, resulting in models that frame lives as disproportionately affected by early negative experiences. This view is dominant, despite little evidence of the stability of the presumably early-developed molecular traits and their potential effects on phenotypes. We argue that in the context of gaps in knowledge and the need for scientists to reason across molecular and phenotypic scales, as well as time spans that can extend beyond an individual's life, specific interpretative frameworks shape the ways in which individual scientific findings are assessed. In the process, scientific reasoning oscillates between understandings of cellular homeostasis and organisms' homeorhesis, or life trajectory. Biologist and historian François Jacob described this framework as the "attitude" that researchers bring to bear on their "objects" of study. Through an analysis of, first, historical and contemporary scientific literature and then ethnographic research with neuroscientists, we consider how early life trauma came to be associated with specific psychological and neurobiological effects grounded in understandings of life trajectories. We conclude with a consideration of the conceptual, ontological, and ethical implications of interpreting life trajectories as the result of the persistence of long-embodied biological traits, persistent life environments, or both.

Troubling Neurobiological Vulnerability: Psychiatric Risk and the Adverse Milieu in Environmental Epigenetics Research

In post-genomic science, the development of etiological models of neurobiological vulnerability to psychiatric risk has expanded exponentially in recent decades, particularly since the neuromolecular and biosocial turns in basic research. Among this research is that of McGill Group for Suicide Studies (MGSS) whose work centers on the identification of major risk factors and epigenetic traits that help to identify a specific profile of vulnerability to psychiatric conditions (e.g., depression) and predict high-risk behaviors (e.g., suicidality). Although the MGSS has attracted attention for its environmental epigenetic models of suicide risk over the years and the translation of findings from rodent studies into human populations, its overall agenda includes multiple research axes, ranging from retrospective studies to clinical and epidemiological research. Common to these research axes is a concern with the long-term effects of adverse experiences on maladaptive trajectories and negative mental health outcomes. As these findings converge with post-genomic understandings of health and also translate into new orientations in global public health, our article queries the ways in which neurobiological vulnerability is traced, measured, and profiled in environmental epigenetics and in the MGSS research. Inspired by the philosophy of Georges Canguilhem and by literature from the social studies of risk and critical public health, we explore how the epigenetic models of neurobiological vulnerability tie into a particular way of thinking about the normal, the pathological, and the milieu in terms of risk. Through this exploration, we examine how early life adversity (ELA) and neurobiological vulnerability are localized and materialized in those emerging models while also considering their broader conceptual and translational implications in the contexts of mental health and global public health interventions. In particular, we consider how narratives of maladaptive trajectories and vulnerable selves who are at risk of harm might stand in as a "new pathological" with healthy trajectories and resilient selves being potentially equated with a "new normal" way of living in the face of adversity. By troubling neurobiological vulnerability as a universal biosocial condition, we suggest that an ecosocial perspective may help us to think differently about the dynamics of mental health and distress in the adverse milieu.