Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph M. Nesse

“Natural selection does not give a fig for our happiness,” writes the author. Yet unpleasant feelings, no less than physical discomfort, represent useful evolutionary responses. Provided depression or anxiety is intense, it becomes a disorder to be treated, regardless of the patient’s life situation. While physicians have long frowned on treating symptoms (pain, fatigue, sadness) as diseases, psychiatry hasn’t gotten the message.

Indeed, there are “good evolutionary reasons why we have desires we cannot fulfill, impulses we cannot control, and relationships full of conflict.” Nesse points out his specialty’s core dilemma. Diseases are not adaptations, but the traits that lead to them can be explained. Psychiatrist Nesse (co-author: Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, 1995, etc.), the founding director of the Center for Evolution and Medicine of Arizona State University, points out that even though successful organisms are well-adapted to their environments, all suffer disease. 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.An ingenious exploration of how Darwinian evolution explains mental disorders. And there are good evolutionary reasons for sexual disorders and for why genes for schizophrenia persist. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environment and our ancient human past. Low moods prevent us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but they often escalate into pathological depression.

Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us all with fragile minds.ĭrawing 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. Now he returns with a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. Randolph Nesse helped to establish the field of evolutionary medicine.

Why do I feel bad? There is real power in understanding our bad feelings. 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.

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randolph M. Nesse