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.
Simplifies an understanding of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, language, religion, self-awareness, free will, and the experience of being human for the last three million years.
Leavened by fresh ideas, vivid clinical vignettes, and narratives of the emotional life of our ancient human ancestors
All manner of rhetorical flourishes and beautifully constructed phrases can pour out in a torrent. Often there is a magnetic quality to this verbal virtuosity, the meaning (semantics) of which can constitute a brilliantly creative flight of ideas. Beyond the grammar and meaning, the sheer musicality of it can elicit rapt fascination.
Forty-five years ago, while in my psychiatric residency, I moonlighted at DC General Hospital’s emergency room. I never knew ever knew who would come in the doors down there at the General. The “White House cases” were a staple, a motley collection of characters pulled off the fence surrounding the presidential residence. One evening is …
Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote, “Nothing can be more gentle than [the human] in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes, and . . . civilized man.” If Rousseau were around, he would probably identify apes as the stupid brutes, but I would extend his “civilized” qualifier to …
In Yuval Harari’s widely acclaimed book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind (2015) he makes this sweeping statement: “The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.” He then makes the case that the event that catapulted …
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 …
major mental illnesses are an epiphenomenon—or “side effect”—of the major adaptation that bestowed upon us the miraculous capacities of reflective self-consciousness and the deep complexity of syntactical language that has enabled our rich symbolic culture. Therefore we should look at the mentally ill as paying the price for our extraordinary capacities.
How the mentally ill tell us who we are
What exactly is it about gold that drives us crazy?
Freud’s observation that humans are hypersexual has become such a cultural staple to have settled in as the sitcom-with-canned-laughter cash-cow. Although I had long been steeped in Darwin’s theories of sexual selection and sexual display, I hadn’t put the two together until I read Geoffrey Miller’s book, The Mating Mind (2000), the thesis of which …
Vital to dating a fossil is to be able to carefully evaluate the surrounding stratum in which the fossil is found which possibly could be accurately dated. Embedded within the symptoms of the manic phase of bipolar disorder is the equivalent of such a stratum, which is clearly of strictly Homo sapiens origin. One of …
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 …
Mania is not usually thought of by itself because it is almost always followed by depression, hence the names Manic Depression or the current Bipolar Disorder. However, while the shutdown response is simultaneous with the underlying emotional hyperactivity in major depression, it is manifested serially in Bipolar Disorder. So, the manic part of this condition …
