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
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 …
