Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph M. Nesse

He says OCD is similar, although in a more focused way. In terms of specific mental illnesses, the author suggests that people with psychosis have a lack of repression (i.e. I found the earlier part of the book more personally relevant/interesting. Chapters on topics like social interactions and sex may have been appealing to some readers, but they weren’t what I was looking for. However, the second half of the book seemed to get a bit bogged down in detail. The book is very thorough, offering examples of numerous research studies, presented in an easily understandable manner.

I’ve heard the same analogy used elsewhere to describe the dysfunctioning mental alarm system in OCD. Just like a smoke detector, protective responses like pain or vomiting get triggered whenever the potential benefits outweigh the downsides, regardless of whether that may cause some false alarms. The smoke detector principle is used to describe responses that may seem unnecessarily strong. The book includes a handy tree diagram, with different situations branching out to leaves of different emotions that would be suited to those situations you can view this on the author’s ResearchGate page. In the face of potential danger, anxiety would increase the chances of survival, while happiness could mean getting eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger. The author argues that emotions have developed to promote survival and reproduction, by increasing our ability to cope with certain situations. the defensive function of certain responses (e.g.evolution selects for reproduction rather than health.trade-offs between increased vulnerability in one area and decreased vulnerability in another.limits on what natural selection can do to select for/against certain characteristics.infectious organisms evolving more rapidly now than in the past.a mismatch of genes to current conditions (e.g.He argues that the biggest problem with current psychiatric research is the lack of acknowledgement of the role of situational factors.įrom an evolutionary psychiatry perspective, there are six key areas of vulnerability: For example, he discusses the flaws of the DSM without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

He takes the rather refreshing approach of acknowledging both the good and the bad of the field of psychiatry. Nesse digs into the science of evolutionary psychiatry to understand why mental illness persists, He explains that while the illnesses themselves aren’t evolutionary adaptations, our vulnerabilities to them may have had evolutionary purposes.

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph M. Nesse