The Cause of Mental Illness: “The Answer Is Just Around the Corner”

Filed under: cognitive capacities, Evolution of Emotion, Evolutionary psychology, Mental illness, Two Mind Hypothesis

Our vulnerability to mental illness is similar to our vulnerability to lower back, hip, and knee pathology, which is the price we pay for the adaptive advantages of upright posture. Mental illness is similarly the price we pay for our mental capacities for large-group bonding, reflective self-awareness, and the complexity of linguistic syntax.

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The Stigma of Mental Illness

Filed under: Uncategorized

In the course of my wife’s rising career in the administration of a university, I was placed in the position of being the chatty spouse of an increasingly important player in the state politics that is part of a large public university. One of the main venues was the president’s box at football games, to …

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Mental Illness – “The Answer Is Right Around the Corner”

Filed under: Evolution of Emotion, Evolutionary psychology | 2 Comments

Suddenly, with the success of Prozac in 1988, mental illness was viewed as a “chemical imbalance” and “all in your genes.” The whole towering intricacy of the psychoanalytic worldview calved like a glacier into the biochemical soup of the brain, and the medical relevancy of the subjective mind tumbled in with it. The word “neurosis” …

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A Philosophical Journey – Discovering the Mystery of Creation in the Mind – a memoir; #10: The Genius of Vanity

Filed under: Evolution of Emotion, Evolutionary psychology, Language, Summary of Philosophy

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 …

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Philosophical Journey – Discovering the Mystery of Creation in the Mind – a memoir; #4: Mental Illness as Feedback Reverberation

Filed under: Summary of Philosophy

My second major insight also was seeded in my prison work. At first I feared that observing men selected for their aggression, then all jammed in there together, would give a grossly distorted view of human nature. I was wrong. I found that viewing interactions in such a setting had the effect of placing one …

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