I hadn't seen much follow-up on this since 2010
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/jun/03-the-insanity-virus
but a quick PubMed search reveals this recent review of the topic, which I can't read because paywall.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26404170
As a graduate student, you probably can through your university access.
I haven't looked at the paper but just based on the abstract, it states 'The need for further investigation is highlighted before any conclusions can be stated with confidence.'
Doesn't every academic paper say that?
You could argue that's true, to some extent. Researchers do tend to hedge their bets. However it's not always the case. For example, Sherrington et al. (1988) ended their abstract by stating, 'This report provides the first strong evidence for the involvement of a single gene in the causation of schizophrenia' (p. 164). That's certainly a much more confident interpretation of findings. They could have preferred to say 'This report suggests that a single gene is involved in schizophrenia, however, conclusions can't be stated with confidence until the findings have been replicated'.
Anyway, searching for a 'cause' for schizophrenia is nonsensical because schizophrenia is not a discrete entity, it's a categorization that encompasses a variety of experiences and behaviors. I recommend having a look at Mary Boyle's (2004) paper entitled, Preventing a Non-Existent Illness?: Some Issues in the Prevention of “Schizophrenia”
Thanks for the reference. I'll take a look at it. In the meantime . . .
Sure. There are tons of things that can cause short-term psychosis: sleep deprivation, drugs, various forms of brain damage. I have no doubt that the long-term psychotic syndrome we currently call "schizophrenia" has risk factor genetics and not gotcha genetics. You're absolutely right that if it were a single gene like Huntington's, we'd have probably found it by now. Even the claim that there are 8 distinct symptom clusters, which got a lot of press a couple of years ago, is not a home run.
http://genomesunzipped.org/2014/09/eight-types-of-schizophrenia-not-so-fast.php
The answer may be epigenetic (as suggested by Sergey Gavrilets's model of testosterone signaling, in response to a similar decades-long failure to find "gay genes"),
http://www.tiem.utk.edu/%7Egavrila/papers/h2.pdf
or viruses like the above suggested, or it may be Toxoplasmosis, or some wacky prion blah-blah-blah, or it may be all of those things in different cases. But biology has to play some role, because brains are biological objects. So if we work on it long enough, we'll figure it out.
This is not to say that individual learning and culture do not also play important roles. This chapter points out that the course of schizophrenia is much more benign in less urban and less alienated cultures than the W.E.I.R.D. society that we currently live in.
http://www2.hawaii.edu/%7Ercastill/Culture_and_Mental_Illness/Chapter1.html
The problem, in my view, is the naive Nature vs. Nurture dichotomy. They interact.