Randolph M. Nesse: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

by Nesse, Randolph M

ISBN: 9780241291085

Published: 2019

One of the world's most respected psychiatrists provides a much-needed new evolutionary framework for making sense of mental illness. With his classic book Why We Get Sick, Randolph Nesse established the field of evolutionary medicine. Now he returns with a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us with fragile minds at all. Drawing on revealing stories from his own clinical practice and insights from evolutionary biology, Nesse shows how negative emotions are useful in certain situations, yet can become excessive. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Low mood prevents us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but it often escalates into pathological depression. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between...