Includes a Bonus PDF of charts and visuals. As it turns out, while many of our most painful emotions often do not serve a proper function in our modern world, they may have a history that allowed for our ancestors to survive. 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. In this episode of Simplify, Caitlin asks Randolph Nesse why he believes that humans have evolved to experience hardships such as depression, anxiety and grief. And there are good evolutionary reasons for sexual disorders and for why genes for schizophrenia persist. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environments and our ancient human past. Low mood prevents us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but it often escalates into pathological depression. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us all with fragile minds.ĭrawing 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. Now he returns with a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. Randolph Nesse helped to establish the field of evolutionary medicine. With his classic book Why We Get Sick, Dr. 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.
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