Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
By:
Sign Up Now!
Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into UK education collection to access this title.
Learn about membership options,
or view our freely available titles.
- Synopsis
- One of the world's most respected psychiatrists provides a much-needed new evolutionary framework for making sense of mental illnessWith his classic book Why We Get Sick, Randolph Nesse established 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 with fragile minds at all.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 excessive. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Low mood prevents us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but it often escalates into pathological depression. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environments and our ancient human past. Taken together, these insights and many more help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it.Good Reasons for Bad Feelings will fascinate anyone who wonders how our minds can be so powerful, yet so fragile, and how love and goodness came to exist in organisms shaped to maximize Darwinian fitness.
- Copyright:
- 2014
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9780241291092
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780141984919, 9780241291085
- Publisher:
- Penguin Books Ltd
- Date of Addition:
- 02/18/20
- Copyrighted By:
- Randolph M. Nesse
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Science, Psychology, Medicine
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.