Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

A founder of the field of evolutionary medicine uses his decades of experience as a psychiatrist to provide a much-needed new framework for making sense of mental illness.

Why do I feel bad? There is real power in understanding our bad feelings. With his classic Why We Get Sick, Dr. Randolph Nesse helped to establish 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 all with fragile minds.
 
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 overwhelming. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Low moods prevent us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but they often escalate into pathological depression. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environment and our ancient human past. And there are good evolutionary reasons for sexual disorders and for why genes for schizophrenia persist. Taken together, these and many more insights help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it by understanding individuals as individuals.

• Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness
• Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
• The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution
• Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny
• The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall
• Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies
• This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution
• Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients
• Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
• Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History