This framework hasn't just failed it has caused and is causing a massive amount of harm. It is currently labelling and drugging tens of millions of human beings including children with erroneous damaging self limiting so called disorders and the drugs are horrific. Yes for some a brief chemical experiment might numb or sedate but long term it's a disaster. If you are unlucky enough to be under a mental ill health team over a decade its abusive. Wild experiments with poly pharmacy and likely given multiple labels. The result, chronic illness, limbo and physically ill and dead 15 to 20 years earlier than the average person not exposed to this illness making profit seeking power obfuscation status quo maintaining machine.
Brilliant reframing of the entire problem. The comparison to congestive heart failure really clarifies how chasing single-cause models for someting like depression was always gonna be the wrong framework. We saw similar pattern in metabolic disese when researchers moved past simple "insulin deficiency" models. The evolutionary vulnerability angle also explains why so many treatments target symptoms rather than causes.
Thank you so much for these comments and best wishes for the new year. I'd like to add some comments on the need for return of psychiatry's gaze to human development as a corollary to your comments about, to paraphrase, the mismatch between evolved functions and the environment. So much valuable work was done in the seventies/eighties which has been lost from later work, which did develop effective strategies to actually help people whose systems have become dysregulated, but discarded when the fashion for blaming neurotransmitters was successfully promoted by what are now widely recognise by vested interests. The work done in Trieste and Western Lapland, the emergence of the psychodynamic model of crisis care (now generally a medical model) are examples. Parallel work done in human development by people like Perry and Trevarthan which focuses on the development needs of the human nervous system could also provide clues to the way forward - how bizarre that child abuse and neglect are drivers of political discourse but not among psychiatrists generally when adults histories of these experiences are neglected in the nosology of adult disorders. Then add the bizarre paradox of the joint social roles of psychiatrists as 'therapeutic' and carceral agents!
Not sure how the fact that we can’t find genes for mental disorders would lead to an evolutionary, adaptational approach to the field. That’s what already played itself out.
I wonder if there might be some sort of fatalistic psychological principle, according to which a certain percentage of people—perfectly normal people—have to feel a bit dejected. People tend to feel happy or unhappy in relation to the degree of esteem or popularity they perceive themselves to have in a group (thanks to their cleverness, sympathy, or success, for example)—particularly in relation to their place or rank within their usual group, where they spend most of their social time.
In any organized group where there are more or less structured activities and interactions (the most common environment for most people), there is almost inevitably a hierarchy that reflects the degree of popularity, competence, accomplishment, etc., of each person in the group.
Doesn't it follow that a certain number of people (those who are the least appreciated or distinguished in their main social environment, such as school or work) must tend to feel rather demoralized, solely as a result of this? How can this be avoided? Perhaps the admirable capacity for self-deception we have, by which we unconsciously create an internal image of ourselves that is more positive than warranted, is a mechanism favored by evolution to minimize this problem. Or, if such a mechanism doesn’t quite work in this case, those negative feelings may in fact be considered valuable, as they may prompt people to improve or to look for other groups in which their talents may be better appreciated, or at least to engage in parallel activities in their free time where they would be on a better footing.
In short, certain disorders, such as anxiety and depression, may be the inevitable byproduct of how natural selection has shaped human psychology (in which case they would not really be disorders). And natural selection does not eliminate the genes involved because they in fact “live long and prosper” by making it painful to be too low in the pecking order. As you once said: “natural selection does not give a fig about our happiness.”
This framework hasn't just failed it has caused and is causing a massive amount of harm. It is currently labelling and drugging tens of millions of human beings including children with erroneous damaging self limiting so called disorders and the drugs are horrific. Yes for some a brief chemical experiment might numb or sedate but long term it's a disaster. If you are unlucky enough to be under a mental ill health team over a decade its abusive. Wild experiments with poly pharmacy and likely given multiple labels. The result, chronic illness, limbo and physically ill and dead 15 to 20 years earlier than the average person not exposed to this illness making profit seeking power obfuscation status quo maintaining machine.
Thank you for sharing this and I’m sorry for your loss
Brilliant reframing of the entire problem. The comparison to congestive heart failure really clarifies how chasing single-cause models for someting like depression was always gonna be the wrong framework. We saw similar pattern in metabolic disese when researchers moved past simple "insulin deficiency" models. The evolutionary vulnerability angle also explains why so many treatments target symptoms rather than causes.
Thank you so much for these comments and best wishes for the new year. I'd like to add some comments on the need for return of psychiatry's gaze to human development as a corollary to your comments about, to paraphrase, the mismatch between evolved functions and the environment. So much valuable work was done in the seventies/eighties which has been lost from later work, which did develop effective strategies to actually help people whose systems have become dysregulated, but discarded when the fashion for blaming neurotransmitters was successfully promoted by what are now widely recognise by vested interests. The work done in Trieste and Western Lapland, the emergence of the psychodynamic model of crisis care (now generally a medical model) are examples. Parallel work done in human development by people like Perry and Trevarthan which focuses on the development needs of the human nervous system could also provide clues to the way forward - how bizarre that child abuse and neglect are drivers of political discourse but not among psychiatrists generally when adults histories of these experiences are neglected in the nosology of adult disorders. Then add the bizarre paradox of the joint social roles of psychiatrists as 'therapeutic' and carceral agents!
"We haven't found them yet, therefore they don't exist."
I'd insult your intelligence but you have no intelligence to insult.
Psychiatrists are a plague on our species. 🖕
Not sure how the fact that we can’t find genes for mental disorders would lead to an evolutionary, adaptational approach to the field. That’s what already played itself out.
brilliant. I came to similar conclusions, to treat something that has multiple causes as something that has a single cause tends to create circular logic https://salusa.substack.com/p/circular-logic-how-psychiatry-fundamentally
I wonder if there might be some sort of fatalistic psychological principle, according to which a certain percentage of people—perfectly normal people—have to feel a bit dejected. People tend to feel happy or unhappy in relation to the degree of esteem or popularity they perceive themselves to have in a group (thanks to their cleverness, sympathy, or success, for example)—particularly in relation to their place or rank within their usual group, where they spend most of their social time.
In any organized group where there are more or less structured activities and interactions (the most common environment for most people), there is almost inevitably a hierarchy that reflects the degree of popularity, competence, accomplishment, etc., of each person in the group.
Doesn't it follow that a certain number of people (those who are the least appreciated or distinguished in their main social environment, such as school or work) must tend to feel rather demoralized, solely as a result of this? How can this be avoided? Perhaps the admirable capacity for self-deception we have, by which we unconsciously create an internal image of ourselves that is more positive than warranted, is a mechanism favored by evolution to minimize this problem. Or, if such a mechanism doesn’t quite work in this case, those negative feelings may in fact be considered valuable, as they may prompt people to improve or to look for other groups in which their talents may be better appreciated, or at least to engage in parallel activities in their free time where they would be on a better footing.
In short, certain disorders, such as anxiety and depression, may be the inevitable byproduct of how natural selection has shaped human psychology (in which case they would not really be disorders). And natural selection does not eliminate the genes involved because they in fact “live long and prosper” by making it painful to be too low in the pecking order. As you once said: “natural selection does not give a fig about our happiness.”