Consequently, one thing this book is not is an attack on traditional psychiatry. Nesse is a traditionally trained, and before he encountered evolutionary thinking, a traditionally trained practicing psychiatrist. Part 1 ( Why Are Mental Disorders So Confusing?) lays out the basics of an evolutionary thinking about mental disorders and also traces Nesse’s own gradual awakening to what an evolutionary perspective could add to his understanding of his own patients, even though it might not necessarily suggest new therapies.
The book is gracefully written for an educated lay audience in four parts. Surprisingly, although I have read many of his papers since then, and heard him give more than a few talks, I had never before come to know Nesse’s outlook on his own chosen discipline, psychiatry. His 1991 Quarterly Review of Biology paper with George Williams brought together many of the ideas that still drive the field. Nesse, of course, is one of the founders of the field of evolutionary medicine. Against all evolutionary logic, we seem to be working hard to do ourselves in.Īgainst this backdrop of disturbing news, I picked up Randy Nesse’s engaging new book, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry (Dutton, $28.00), in the hope that it would help me understand a bit more about the human behavior and especially mental states, disorders, and diseases than I currently did.
These numbers do not include an estimated 88 000 deaths from alcohol abuse or nearly 500 000 more attributed to cigarette smoking. In America, >70 000 people died from drug overdoses in 2017 -the latest year for which reliable statistics are available-and nearly 50 000 more died from suicide. This is similar to the 35% of global college students who report having a mental disorder. In Europe, 38% of the population suffers from at least one mental disorder annually. The modern world, it seems, needs all the psychiatric help it can muster.
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