Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph M. Nesse

Trade-offs: everything in the body has pros and cons.Constraints: natural selection can only act on existing variation, cannot shift to new strategy once a path is chosen.Well-intended practices like taking full antibiotic course can actually promote resistance.Infection: bacteria and viruses evolve faster than we do.Mismatch: our bodies are unprepared to cope with modern envt (esp availability of plentiful food).Six evolutionary reasons to explain vulnerability to diseases: Genetic variation that decrease a n individual’s fitness can still become more common if it benefits relatives with the same genes → kin selection explains some altruistic behavior.Natural selection shapes us to maximize number of offspring who survive to reproduce themselves- not necessarily health, longevity, mating.heart failure, autism), 3) diagnosing conditions with no specific tissue pathology, but rather a dysregulated control system (ex. negative emotions) as disease) 2) recognizing that many syndromes have dozens of cause (ex. Benefits of moving towards truly medical model of disease in psychiatry → 1) not viewing symptoms (ex.Many people with same diagnoses → different symptoms one person with a set of symptoms → diagnoses… do our definitions of disorders even correspond to “real” things?.Mental disorders more like clusters of symptoms.Psychiatric diagnosis doesn’t distinguish symptoms from diseases, and it incorrectly assumes each disorder has a specific cause. Leads to similar question of how we can experience things like love and morality if we are only driven by natural selection?.Usually because sources of mental pain (anxiety, depression, etc.) are useful in some situations.New question about how natural selection leads to things like mental illness → similar to the classic question of why life is so full of suffering.Diseases are not adaptations, but our vulnerabilities to disease have evolutionary explanations.

When considering evolutionary explanations, important to address four questions: What is the mechanism? What is its adaptive significance? How does it develop in an individual? What is its evolutionary history?.

Cannot diagnose by neurological of genetic factors.Field of psychiatry → narrowing to perspective that “mental disorders are brain diseases,” but need to also consider insights from behaviorism, psychoanalysis, cognitive therapy, family dynamics, public health, social psych.

Why has natural selection left us so vulnerable to mental disorders? Part One: Why Are Mental Disorders So Confusing? 1.

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph M. Nesse