
eBOOK
Good Reasons for Bad Feelings
Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
eBook | 12 February 2019
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One of the world's most respected psychiatrists provides a much-needed new evolutionary framework for making sense of mental illness
With his classic book Why We Get Sick, Randolph Nesse established the field of evolutionary medicine. Now he returns with a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us with fragile minds at all.
Drawing on revealing stories from his own clinical practice and insights from evolutionary biology, Nesse shows how negative emotions are useful in certain situations, yet can become excessive. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Low mood prevents us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but it often escalates into pathological depression. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environments and our ancient human past. Taken together, these insights and many more help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it.
Good Reasons for Bad Feelings will fascinate anyone who wonders how our minds can be so powerful, yet so fragile, and how love and goodness came to exist in organisms shaped to maximize Darwinian fitness.
Industry Reviews
Randolph Nesse, who trained psychiatrists for many years, has for a quarter century been a key leader of evolutionary medicine. Good Reasons for Bad Feelings integrates these two strands of his life and thought in a readable, insightful book, as much a philosophy of emotions as it is a new window on mental illness. All who want to know themselves should read it.
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ISBN: 9780241291092
ISBN-10: 0241291097
Published: 12th February 2019
Format: ePUB
Language: English
Number of Pages: 384
Audience: General Adult
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
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This product is categorised by
- Non-FictionPsychologyAbnormal Psychology
- Non-FictionScienceBiology, Life SciencesLife Sciences in GeneralEvolution
- Non-FictionPsychologyPsychology: Emotions
- Non-FictionScienceBiology, Life SciencesHuman Biology
- Non-FictionMedicineOther Branches of MedicinePsychiatry
- Non-FictionScienceScience in GeneralPopular Science
- Non-FictionScienceBiology, Life SciencesDevelopmental Biology
- Non-FictionMedicineOther Branches of MedicineClinical Psychology
- Non-FictionPsychologyPsychological Theory, Systems, Schools of Thought & Viewpoints