Product Information
A founder of the field of evolutionary medicine uses his decades of experience as a psychiatrist to provide a much-needed new 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 all with fragile minds. 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. 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.Product Identifiers
PublisherPenguin Books LTD
ISBN-139780141984919
eBay Product ID (ePID)2317611168
Product Key Features
Number of Pages384 Pages
Publication NameGood Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
LanguageEnglish
SubjectPsychology, Science, Biology
Publication Year2020
TypeTextbook
Subject AreaClinical Psychology, Biological Psychology
AuthorRandolph M. Nesse
Dimensions
Item Height198 mm
Item Weight281 g
Additional Product Features
Country/Region of ManufactureUnited Kingdom
Title_AuthorRandolph M. Nesse