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Printable Handouts
Navigable Slide Index
- Introduction
- Spectacular progress
- But confusion persists
- Allen Frances
- Why isn't the mind better designed?
- The evolutionary explanation for brains
- My path
- WHO 15 leading DALYs for women 18-45
- Mental disorders vs. other medical disorders
- Helping individuals
- A simple thesis
- Two kinds of explanation essential
- Both kinds of explanation needed
- Would every detail be enough?
- Six reasons why diseases exist
- Evolution and mental disorders
- Specific topics (for other times)
- Trade-offs (mental disorders)
- Focus: defenses vs. defects
- Defense regulation
- Optimal defense regulation
- Signal detection theory
- Criterion response
- Should you flee from a noise?
- The smoke detector principle
- Most human suffering is normal but unnecessary
- Emotions
- The phylogeneic tree of emotions
- Why are negative emotions so prevalent?
- Schopenhauer
- Charles Darwin
- E. O. Wilson
- When are negative emotions useful?
- Anxiety disorders
- Anxiety subtypes match dangers
- Panic disorder
- Agoraphobia
- Hypophobia: a neglected disorder
- Do early falls create later fears?
- Emotions for goal pursuit?
- Emotions for situations arise in pursuing goals
- Depression: two questions
- Do not misunderstand
- Why vary motivation?
- Motivation for specific goals
- When payoff is positive - high motivation
- When payoff is negative - motivation disengages
- What is the best thing to do when costs > benefit?
- A motto for unpropitious times
- Depressogenic situation
- Despair
- William Blake
- Why don't people give up on hopeless goals?
- Life events vs. life situations
- Understanding individual's motivational structures
- Research on goals and affect
- Low mood subtypes?
- Keller and Nesse, 2005
- Path analysis
- Epidemiological study
- Kind of problem vs. depression
- How can we use the useful behavioral biology?
- Pathological optimism: a neglected disorder
- What will it take to bring evolution to psychiatry?
- Books (1)
- Books (2)
- Books (3)
- Base DSM on understanding emotions
- A Medical model for diagnosis
- Research opportunities
- Opportunities for industry
- Education: actions
- Psychiatric associations: actions
- Clinical advances
- Conclusion
Topics Covered
- Psychiatry is just now recognizing the need for evolutionary explanations
- Same six origins of vulnerability as the rest of medicine
- Emotional disorders are dysregulated defenses
- Research and treatment implications
- Towards a fully biological foundation for psychiatry
Talk Citation
Nesse, R. (2016, August 31). Mental disorders in the light of evolutionary biology [Video file]. In The Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection, Henry Stewart Talks. Retrieved December 3, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.69645/EWCQ4450.Export Citation (RIS)
Publication History
Financial Disclosures
- Prof. Randolph Nesse has not informed HSTalks of any commercial/financial relationship that it is appropriate to disclose.
A selection of talks on Neurology
Transcript
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0:00
Welcome to the Henry Stewart Talks lecture about evolution and mental disorders.
At first blush, it might appear that this topic is peripheral.
Mental disorders seem to some people to be somehow different from medical disorders.
In fact, they are different but not because they're less severe or less prevalent.
In fact, they are more severe and more prevalent accounting for
more disease burden than all the rest of medical disorders combined,
at least for people of reproductive ages in developed countries.
But there's another reason why evolution is so important for psychiatry.
Psychiatry has tried to become as biological as possible in the past 20 years,
but in doing so, it skipped much of the biology that has been so useful to medicine.
An evolutionary approach may help to rectify this situation.
0:46
The progress in psychiatry over the past two decades is nothing short of spectacular.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
there was some thought that perhaps
psychiatry didn't really need to be a part of medicine.
Psychotherapy was in its ascendancy and
the effective drugs for treating mental disorders were just being used widely.
But with the new discovery of drugs and
recognition of their utility in combination with insurance
and other forces that made psychiatry try to quickly
establish itself as just as medical as the rest of medicine,
the profession decided to be as biological as possible and as medical as possible.
It has succeeded tremendously and patients have benefited.
Psychiatry now has more evidence based science than most other areas of medicine,
and in fact it's enormously more effective than it was just 20 years ago.
Most syndromes can be relieved at least to some degree,
and diagnosis is vastly more reliable than it was when I
began in the profession 30 years ago and most remarkable of all,
we're beginning to understand the neural mechanisms that account for disease and even the
mechanisms that account for the normal regulation of emotions and behavior.