good reasons for bad feelings randolph nesse

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. Taken together, these insights and many more help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environments and our ancient human past. Low mood prevents us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but it often escalates 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 with fragile minds at all.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 excessive. Stein Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative.

Now he returns with a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. 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. Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry Dan J. With his classic book Why We Get Sick, Randolph Nesse established the field of evolutionary medicine. He navigates the dangers of either too much or too little adaptationism, deftly handles the false dichotomy between psychological and biological perspectives, and bridges abstract. One of the world's most respected psychiatrists provides a much-needed new evolutionary framework for making sense of mental illness Now, in Good Reasons For Bad Feelings, he tackles the deeper evolutionary question of why we, our minds, and our brains are so vulnerable to mental illness.

Good reasons for bad feelings randolph nesse