Good Reasons for Bad Feelings
Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
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 modern environments and our ancient human past. Taken together, these insights and many more help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it.
Good Reasons for Bad Feelings will fascinate anyone who wonders how our minds can be so powerful, yet so fragile, and how love and goodness came to exist in organisms shaped to maximize Darwinian fitness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nesse (Why We Get Sick), director of the Center for Evolutionary Medicine at Arizona State University, thought-provokingly comments on modern medicine's continuing difficulties in treating mental illness. Nesse notes that identifying the brain abnormalities and genes responsible for specific disorders has not, contrary to expectations, led to much progress; for example, there have been "no major breakthroughs in the treatment of depression in the last 20 years." He hypothesizes that since natural selection did not eliminate "anxiety, depression, addiction, anorexia, and the genes that cause autism, schizophrenia, and manic-depressive illness," they must have some benefits. He does not claim to know what all of those benefits are, making clear at the outset that since this is a new field, his conjectures may well prove wrong. Nesse shows a particular knack for clearly explaining his concepts, such as anxiety's value as a survival mechanism against predators and how the cost of fleeing in panic unnecessarily is outweighed by the benefit of doing so from a genuine threat, which he terms the smoke detector principle. Nesse fully meets his modest but laudable goal of providing a conversation-starter on why mental illness should be viewed from an evolutionary perspective.)
