The Oct. 1 issue of The American Journal of Psychiatry will release both a study and editorial suggesting that a set of suicidal gene markers have been discovered. That is, people with these markers have a higher incidence of suicidal thinking (which is often the precursor to suicidal action). This is a significant finding, since there has been little previous evidence that suicidal thoughts or behaviors might be coded all the way down into our genes.

Obviously, genes are not the whole story and environment plays a significant factor into deciding whether we act on a thought, or whether our personality has learned enough resiliency to “go against” such genetic encoding.

Rumor has it that a company will also be marketing a genetic test kit for this set of “suicide markers.”

We’ll post more about this when the study is published on Monday, but thought we’d give a heads-up ahead of time.

Dr. John Grohol is the CEO and founder of Psych Central. He is an author, researcher and expert in mental health online, and has been writing about online behavior, mental health and psychology issues -- as well as the intersection of technology and human behavior -- since 1992. Dr. Grohol sits on the editorial board of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking and is a founding board member and treasurer of the Society for Participatory Medicine.

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    Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 26 Sep 2007
    Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.