Mental disorders ascend from neural and psychological mechanisms that have been built and shaped by natural selection through our evolutionary history. Looking at psychopathology through the lens of evolution is the only way to comprehend the deeper nature of mental disorders and turn a mass of genetic, behavioral, and neurobiological conclusions into a coherent, theoretically grounded discipline. The rise of evolutionary psychopathology is part of a thrilling scientific movement in medicine and psychology — a movement that is fundamentally changing the way we think about health and disease.
Evolutionary Psychopathology (PDF) takes steps toward a unified approach to psychopathology, using the models of life-history theory — a biological account of how separate differences in physiology, development, and behavior arise from tradeoffs in survival and reproduction — to construct an integrative framework for mental disorders. This ebook reviews existing evolutionary models of specific conditions and connects them in a broader perspective, with the aim of explaining the large-scale patterns of risk and comorbidity that distinguish psychopathology. Using the life history framework permits for seamless integration of mental disorders with normative individual differences in personality and cognition, and provides new conceptual tools for the analysis of developmental, genetic, and neurobiological data. The concepts presented in the ebook are used to derive a new taxonomy of mental disorders, the Fast-Slow-Defense (FSD) model. The FSD model is the first classification system openly based on evolutionary concepts, a biologically grounded alternative to transdiagnostic models. The ebook reviews a wide range of common mental disorders discusses their classification in the FSD model and recognizes functional subtypes within existing diagnostic categories.
Reviews
“Darwin has ultimately met Freud, in the first true synthesis of evolutionary biology with psychiatry and psychology. The result–this ebook–is an insightful and deeply-novel analysis of why and how we as humans are beset with a particular range of mental illnesses, in the context of our evolutionary history.” — Bernard Crespi, Simon Fraser University
“Evolutionary Psychopathology offers a framework integrating not only the extensive but fragmented literature on evolutionary psychology and psychopathology but also a number of other research lines emerging in this period of Kuhnian ‘extraordinary science’. I believe that psychiatrists and psychologists of different theoretical orientations should be aware of the author’s ‘life-history theory, and try to test it in research and clinical settings.” — Mario Maj, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Naples
NOTE: The product only includes the ebook Evolutionary Psychopathology: A Unified Approach in ePub. A converted PDF is available on request. No access codes are included.
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