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Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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About Good Reasons For Bad Feelings: Insights From The
Product Description 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. Review “A fascinating study of the evolutionary roots of mental illness.” -- The Economist, "The Best Books of 2019" “All psychiatrists and patients who find themselves having occasional ‘bad feelings’ about our current understanding of mental illness will have many ‘good reasons’ to consult this book. I do fully expect that someday nearly all psychiatry will be identified as evolutionary psychiatry. If so, Randolph Nesse’s book should be seen as the field’s founding document.” -- The Wall Street Journal “If your idea of self-care skews less spiritual and more scientific, Nesse’s new book on why humans are so vulnerable to a variety of mental disorders is a must. In this new work, he covers both why some people get sick, as well as why natural selection left us all so vulnerable to developing mental illness. Topics covered include changes in our environment impact us, how anxiety and low mood sometimes help our genes and how social anxiety is nearly universal.” --Forbes “Important and fascinating…The future of clinical psychiatry is likely to be embedded in the integration of this [Nesse’s] type of evolutionary theoretical framework.” -- Nature “An ingenious exploration of how Darwinian evolution explains mental disorders.” -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Nesse ( Why We Get Sick), director of the Center for Evolutionary Medicine at Arizona State University, thought-provokingly comments on modern medicine’s continuing difficulties in treating mental illness… Nesse fully meets his modest but laudable goal of providing a conversation-starter on why mental illness should be viewed from an evolutionary perspective.” -- Publishers Weekly “Nesse’s book offers fresh thinking in a field that has come to feel stagnant, even if new therapeutic avenues are not immediately obvious... Recasting our psychiatric and psychological shortcomings as the unintended sprawling by-products of evolution seems a useful way of understanding why our minds malfunction in the multiple, messy ways that they do.” -- The Financial Times “An excellent and timely account of the history, development and implications of evolutionary psychiatry.” -- Evening Standard “If you’re curious about why humans seem stuck with emotional suffering, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings provides thoughtful evolutionary commentary. Nesse looks at emotions, addictions, and mental afflictions every which way and, to his credit, does not pretend to have all the answers. The ones he offers and the questions he raises a
