Good reasons for bad feelings : insights from the frontier of evolutionary psychiatry
Nesse, Randolph M2020
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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.
Main title:
Author:
Imprint:
[London] : Penguin Books, 2020.
Collation:
xv, 363 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm.
Notes:
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2019.Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN:
9780141984919
Dewey class:
616.89001
Language:
English
Added title:
BRN:
372610
More Information:
| Location | Collection | Call number | Status/Desc |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brighton Library | Adult Non Fiction - Health and Wellbeing | 616.89001 NES | Available |