Susceptibility to Mental Illness May Have Helped Humans Adapt Over the Millennia

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    • 388 posts
    October 16, 2023 3:46 PM CDT

    The below link is a summary article from a book written by Randolph Nesse, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry.

    https://getpocket.com/explore/item/susceptibility-to-mental-illness-may-have-helped-humans-adapt-over-the-millennia?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

    Randolph Nesse, a professor of life sciences at Arizona State University, attributes high rates of psychiatric disorders to natural selection operating on our genes without paying heed to our emotional well-being. What’s more, the selective processes took place thousands of years before the unique stresses of modern urban existence, leading to a mismatch between our current environment and the one for which we were adapted.

    Is he saying that some of us are genetically predisposed through natural selection to be depressed?