“Looking for the brain abnormalities causing mental disorders without understanding normal function is like looking for the heart abnormalities causing heart failure without knowing what the heart is for.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The sexual competition hypothesis suggests that women are vulnerable to eating disorders because modern media augment the natural motivation for having a desirable body in order to get better mates. This explains why so many women use extreme caloric restriction in intense efforts to be attractive, but it does not by itself explain anorexia nervosa and bulimia.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“An individual may feel guilty about the event(s) that triggered their depression. Feelings of guilt make one reflect upon how their actions led to that outcome and thus help minimise the likelihood of the same thing happening again. The greater the role oplayed by one's own actions in the situations that led to the event that triggered the depression, the greater the sense of guilt.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“An individual may feel guilty about the event(s) that triggered their depression. Feelings of guilt make one reflect upon how their actions led to that outcome and thus help minimize the likelihood of the same thing happening again. The greater the role played by one's own actions in the situations that led to the event that triggered the depression, the greater the sense of guilt.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Suicide can help pass on an individual's genes to the next generation in a situation where that individual is a burden to their close relatives and their own reproductive potential is weak. By taking their life, an individual may contribute to the reproductive success of their close relatives and thus to the proliferation of their own genes. In such a case, that individual's close relatives would have one mouth less to feed and no sick individual to look after. Indeed, several studies have shown that suicidal thoughts and suicides are more common in those who have poor chances of reproduction and who feel they are merely a burden to their loved ones.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Major depressive disorder is a disease caused by features of the contemporary Western lifestyle: social isolation, limited physical activity, chronic stress and unhealthy food.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The belief that one is unattractive can be as intractable as the belief that one has an undiagnosed disease. It's often present in people who are, to other people's perceptions, very attractive indeed. However, once the belief in one's unattractiveness gets established it can be used to account for all manner of experiences, such as being rejected by a date. The normal trait related to this disorder is wanting to be attractive. In the usual range, this is almost certainly useful.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“People with a great tendency to anxiety get protection at the expense of missed opportunities. People with defficient anxiety can take risks that bring benefits at the cost of damage and loss.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Nightmares concerning animals under the bed are very common and easy to interpret in an evolutionary context where there were many wild animals but no houses. When children begin social life in groups, fears of being rejected or abandoned emerge in a process that elaborates into the extraordinary richness and complexity of social life.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Are you jealous of the ocean's generosity?
Why would you refuse to give
this love to anyone?
Fish don't hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim in the huge, fluid freedom.”
Source: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing