Taken together, these insights and many more help to explain the pervasiveness of human suffering, and show us new paths for relieving it. Low mood prevents us from wasting effort in pursuit of unreachable goals, but it often escalates into pathological depression. Anxiety protects us from harm in the face of danger, but false alarms are inevitable. Instead of asking why certain people suffer from mental illness, Nesse asks why natural selection has left us all with fragile minds.ĭrawing 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. Now he returns with a book that transforms our understanding of mental disorders by exploring a fundamentally new question. With his classic book Why We Get Sick, Randolph Nesse established the field of evolutionary medicine. 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
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