Grace, Fall, and Redemption: Mental illness and Our Evolutionary Narrative
Embark with me on a journey delving deep into the relationship between severe mental illnesses and the primal emotions fueling our social interactions.
Embark with me on a journey delving deep into the relationship between severe mental illnesses and the primal emotions fueling our social interactions.
I began my career working in a maximum-security prison with a state-mandated treatment program. One of the inmates there, whose countenance still haunts me from time to time, was a gaunt middle-aged man who used to stand in the corner of the common room and blankly stare out the window all day, chain-smoking. His posture, …
With two high-profile suicides in the news, it is timely to discuss the inner experience of the most lethal form of depression. Seeking escape from an intense feeling of entrapment is intrinsic to melancholic depression, among the most dreaded of all mental illnesses. Aptly named by Hippocrates, melancholia means “black bile,” a potent metaphor for …
I recently got a note from someone about Old Mind, New Mind who has suffered from mental illness. As soon as he found out that the book was about the relationship between mental illness and human evolution, he assumed that I thought that mental illnesses are adaptive in some way and expressed his reservations about …
How the mentally ill tell us who we are
Melancholic depression is usually precipitated by a feeling of being trapped economically or socially and its subjective experience reveals that it represents a pathological exaggeration of moods that normally emanate from the social sphere.
Religion is present in two of the illnesses I treated and studied. I am fairly certain that, in both of these mental conditions, it had to do with the patients’ belief system prior to the illness—with whether the individual was primarily motivated by money and status or by religion and morality. In a small number …
The first mental illness that revealed a major component of human nature was the most common variety of severe depression, which, due to a quirk of history, is called “atypical depression.” It is officially recognized that a major ingredient of this kind of depression is separation anxiety, blown up into an illness by the pathological …
Religion presented itself primarily in two of the illnesses I treated and studied. I am pretty sure that in both cases it had to do with the patient’s belief system prior to the illness—whether the individual was primarily motivated by money and status or by religion and morality. In a minority of cases, melancholia would …
Mental illnesses lift out into bas-relief segments of our normal emotional function that have been evolved in the successive eras of our six million year hominid legacy, as if placing them under a microscope and magnifying their fundamental elements. The anxiety disorders reveal that the source of their emanation is our social ecology. Separation …
After observing severe mental illness for 20 years, I concluded that they all represented different types of emotional hyperactivity that had escaped from regulation. Illnesses that included symptoms of lethargy or lack of initiative, such as some forms of depression and Schizophrenia, were manifestations of a “shutdown response” to underlying emotional hyperactivity. Crucial to this …
