Evolutionary Psychiatry Quotes

“People with a great tendency to anxiety get protection at the expense of missed opportunities. People with deficient anxiety can take risks that bring benefits at the cost of damage and loss”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Anxiety and fear are emotions. Emotions exist only because they have given selective advantages. This makes it tempting to try to define different emotions in terms of their functions. Fear protects against present danger, anxiety against possible dangers. However, defining emotions in terms of their functions risks tacit creationism: the tendency to view bodies as if they are machines.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Understanding the starvation protection response helps eating disorders patients understand why restrictive dieting doesn't work.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Everyone knows that the environments we created to satisfy our wishes for sweets, salt, fat and leisure have resulted in epidemics of chronic disease. Obesity and eating disorders are prime examples, but alcoholism and drug addiction are also made possible by ready access to substances and means of administration that have only recently become available. Lack of selection until recent times against these often fatal disorders is an essential part of any evolutionary explanation.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Criminalization and interdiction have filled prisons and corrupted governments in country after country. However, increasingly potent drugs that can be synthetized in any basement make controlling access increasingly impossible. Legalization seems like a good idea but causes more addiction. Our strongest defense is likely to be education, but scare stories make kids want to try drugs. Every child should learn that drugs take over the brain and turn some people into miserable zombies and that we have no way to tell who will get addicted the fastest. They should also learn that the high fades as addiction takes over.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Most chemicals that give humans a buzz evolved to disrupt insect nervous systems. If our brains used different chemicals, we would not be so vulnerable. However, we have common ancestors with insects. It was long ago, about 500 million years ago, when our ancestors split off from the arthropod lines that became modern insects. However, our neurochemicals remain about the same as theirs. Fortunately, most plant neurotoxins don’t kill us. We have evolved to eat plants, and we are much larger than insects, so low doses are not fatal. But drugs can hijack our motivation mechanisms and take control of our lives.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, 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.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Mental disorders need evolutionary explanations, but viewing disorders as adaptations is a mistake. The correct objects of explanation are traits that leave all members of a species vulnerable to a disorder.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Kin selection shapes tendences to make sacrifices that benefit family members who share genes identical by descent. The costs of such sacrifices are highest and most satisfying for children and siblings, but problems experienced by extended family members can nonetheless cause great distress.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“An extraordinary proportion of life problems and resulting mental disorders arise from mating conflicts. Unrequited love, the pain of being rejected, the fear of being left, being stalked, being harassed, jealousy and being trapped in an abusive relationship are common precipitants of mental disorders.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“...social media now seem poised to harm our mental health as much as fast food harms our physical health. We can't resist its pull despite the anxiety, depression and feelings of social inadequacy that are aroused by unprecedented social comparisons.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“In contemporary developed countries, loneliness has been described as an epidemic caused by the loss of traditional social connectivity and a reliance on technology. Therefore, it seems likely that the Alzheimer's disease risk factors of social isolation and loneliness were less prevalent in the past.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“We humans are complex creatures and we live multifaceted lives; there is rarely a single reason for any aspect of what we feel or for how we behave.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“In good times, when material resources are abundant and women have plentiful social support, maternal negativity has little place in the lives of women. However, in times of scarcity and/or when women are unsupported, negative feelings can emerge to color the emotional palette and behavior of mothers.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The standard model of schooling in which 20 or more young people of the same age are taught in classrooms for about 5 hours a day on most days of the year for 10 years certainly runs counter some of our evolved behavioral strategies.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“From the perspective of life history theory, a speeded-up metabolism, less trust, less relaxation and more suspicion and risk-taking might be adaptive for abusive homes or violent neighborhoods. In such environments there is little emotional security or expectation that things will work out well.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“It is also important to note that not all pathological presentations are caused by the environment. A child may have underlying difficulties such as intellectual disabilities or other neurodevelopmental disorders. On the other hand, just because a child has survived unscathed does not mean that the environment was benign. We know that some children are naturally less sensitive to environmental influences and as such are more resilient to harsh environments.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“We know that chronic high stress levels contribute to mental and physical disorders in later life; however, this process does not necessarily inhibit reproduction, and thus the cycle is perpetuated unless the environment changes as natural selection does not select for happiness, but only for survival and reproduction.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Humans can survive in a wide range of physical environments, from the Arctic to rainforests to the Sahara. They can also survive in a wide range of emotional environments, from loving to neglectful to violent ones.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Girls raised in dangerous, stressed or abusive environments are more likely to have a range of mental health issues, are typically more avoidant or reactive and are less able subsequently to parent as successfully as might otherwise have been the case.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Female reproductive life history is linked to cardiovascular, metabolic, inflammatory and endocrine alterations to physiology in ways that have not only short-term but also long-term and, in some cases, permanent effects.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Treatment of eating disorders is improved by the recognition that strenuous dieting arouses famine protection mechanisms that are prone to initiate a positive feedback spiral.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Eating disorders were not shaped by selection, but mechanisms that regulate eating during famines were. ADHD was not shaped by selection, but mechanisms that regulate attention were. Serious depression was not shaped by natural selection, but capacities for normal low and high mood were.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Eating disorders are not caused by abnormal genes; they are caused by normal genes interacting with abnormal environments.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“Patients with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are surrounded by excess food, but their bodies are aware only of starvation. Their behavior is appropriate for a situation in which getting just a few extra calories might make the difference between life and death.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“The starting point is recognizing that selection has shaped powerful mechanisms to protect against starvation. During a famine, those mechanisms motivate animals to get food -any food- eat it quickly, and eat more than usual, because food supplies are obviously erratic. The system also adjusts the body weight set point upward because extra fat stores are valuable when food sources are unreliable. And, as noted already, weight loss slows down metabolism, which is appropriate when a person is starving but the opposite of what is needed when trying to lose weight. Also, intermittent access to food signals unreliable access to food supplies, so it increases food intake and bingeing, even in rats.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry

“The trajectory is clear: our minds have always been vulnerable to capture by alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, coca, and opium, but problems with them have escalated as advances in chemistry, transportation, and technology have increased the diversity, purity, and availability of drugs. The mismatch was bad before; now it’s getting much worse.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry