By Sudeshna Sarkar
Kathmandu, Nov 11 (IANS) Can you conquer Mt Everest, the highest peak in the world? It depends on your genes and your personality, says a psychiatrist who studied mountaineers over four years to assess their personalities.
Erik Monasterio, a senior lecturer of forensic psychiatry from New Zealand, says people who choose to take up high-risk sports like mountaineering have personalities different from the average person’s.
In his study, “The risks of adventure sports”, posted on mountaineering website mounteverest.net, Monasterio says climbers generally enjoy “exploring unfamiliar places and situations”. They are also “easily bored, try to avoid monotony and so tend to be quick-tempered, excitable and impulsive”.
Climbers also have good self-esteem and self-reliance and tend to be high achievers.
The study says they score high in the areas of novelty-seeking and self-directedness but low on harm-avoidance.
The researcher says that average people who experience or witness the level of trauma he came across in his studies are likely to get mental disorders – like post-traumatic stress disorder and other mood or anxiety problems.
However, climbers remain virtually immune, showing higher resilience than fire-fighters or even soldiers.
Monasterio says that researchers in Switzerland who studied a large number of mountain guides found that though they had experienced trauma similar to that faced by fire fighters, only three percent of the guides developed post-traumatic stress disorder whereas the incidence was as high as 20 percent among the fire fighters.
“An interesting possibility is that risk-taking sports people may be protected from the psychological complications that generally accompany serious trauma,” the study says.
“This could explain why accidents don’t put them off adventure sports.”
Biology and genetics play “at least a moderate role” in determining who takes up adventure sports.
Monasterio says that a man’s level of harm avoidance, novelty-seeking and sensation-seeking traits are inherited from his parents and determined by the level of a number of brain neurotransmitters, called monoamines.
“These monoamines (dopamine and serotonin) are chemicals that pass information between lower and higher brain regions,” the study says.
“High novelty-seeking and sensation-seeking are both associated with low levels of dopamine.”
Monasterio says he found the climbers he had studied had low levels of harm-avoidance – meaning they could endure risk and uncertainty without “becoming overwhelmed by fear and anxiety”.
While this helps climbers, in a way it also harms them since it may contribute to a tendency to underestimate danger and may partially account for the high rates of accidents, he says.
Monasterio says that further research on harm avoidance may eventually help to identify vulnerable individuals and offer early interventions.
“Further studies of risk-taking sports people could have important public health benefits,” the study says.