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.
My basic clinical observation is that at the heart of mental illness is the pathological hyperactivity of the painful social emotions and that the inability to experience pleasure is secondary and reactive.
The genes associated with these conditions are no longer viewed as patently pathological, but as revealing small weaknesses in a regulatory system that has been pushed to the very limits of its task.
The social mind I was studying developed over millions of years by individuals using the same diagnostic instrument I employed in examining my patients.
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.
Just because a therapy is effective, it does not follow that whatever is being corrected by the therapy caused the illness in the first place.
Outline of Theory of Human Nature-1st of Series: Influences, Method, Feedback Reverberation, Emotional Fossils, Atypical Depression, Melancholia, Panic Disorder, Group & Hierarchy Formation
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” …
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 …
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” …
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 …
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 …
