Evolutionary Psychiatry Quotes

“The grief triggered by the loss of loved ones does not appear to be an adaptation produced by natural selection as it does not appear to increase an individual's fitness in any way -at least not in non-social species. Depression caused by loss is more likely to be a by-product of the ability to form long-term attachment relationships. Grief is the price we have to pay when the attachment relationship is finally broken. This assumption is supported by the fact that a person may also experience symptoms of depression as a result of the death of their beloved dog, horse or other pet. The stronger the attachment, the longer the symptoms of depression last. On the other hand, the knowledge of the pain caused by the loss of an important person or pet makes us take more care of the people or pets that are important to us.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Everyone knows that the environments we created to satisfy our wishes for sweets, salt, fat and leisure have resulted in epidemics of chronic disease. Obesity and eating disorders are prime examples, but alcoholism and drug addiction are also made possible by ready access to substances and means of administration that have only recently become available. Lack of selection until recent times against these often fatal disorders is an essential part of any evolutionary explanation.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Understanding the starvation protection response helps eating disorders patients understand why restrictive dieting doesn't work.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Anxiety and fear are emotions. Emotions exist only because they have given selective advantages. This makes it tempting to try to define different emotions in terms of their functions. Fear protects against present danger, anxiety against possible dangers. However, defining emotions in terms of their functions risks tacit creationism: the tendency to view bodies as if they are machines.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“People with a great tendency to anxiety get protection at the expense of missed opportunities. People with deficient anxiety can take risks that bring benefits at the cost of damage and loss”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The first, pain, is an ancient self-protective signal that enables animals to navigate fitness hazards in their external and internal environments. The aversiveness of pain is designed precisely to induce action to end or escape it. The second suicidogenic adaptation is the exceptional intellect of the mature brain, which is able to obey the imperative to escape pain, effectively but maladaptively, by terminating its own consciousness. These dual 'pain' and 'brain' conditions - motivation and means, respectively - are not only necessary for deliberate self-killing but sufficient.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Female reproductive life history is linked to cardiovascular, metabolic, inflammatory and endocrine alterations to physiology in ways that have not only short-term but also long-term and, in some cases, permanent effects.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Girls raised in dangerous, stressed or abusive environments are more likely to have a range of mental health issues, are typically more avoidant or reactive and are less able subsequently to parent as successfully as might otherwise have been the case.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Humans can survive in a wide range of physical environments, from the Arctic to rainforests to the Sahara. They can also survive in a wide range of emotional environments, from loving to neglectful to violent ones.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“We know that chronic high stress levels contribute to mental and physical disorders in later life; however, this process does not necessarily inhibit reproduction, and thus the cycle is perpetuated unless the environment changes as natural selection does not select for happiness, but only for survival and reproduction.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“It is also important to note that not all pathological presentations are caused by the environment. A child may have underlying difficulties such as intellectual disabilities or other neurodevelopmental disorders. On the other hand, just because a child has survived unscathed does not mean that the environment was benign. We know that some children are naturally less sensitive to environmental influences and as such are more resilient to harsh environments.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“From the perspective of life history theory, a speeded-up metabolism, less trust, less relaxation and more suspicion and risk-taking might be adaptive for abusive homes or violent neighborhoods. In such environments there is little emotional security or expectation that things will work out well.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The standard model of schooling in which 20 or more young people of the same age are taught in classrooms for about 5 hours a day on most days of the year for 10 years certainly runs counter some of our evolved behavioral strategies.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“In good times, when material resources are abundant and women have plentiful social support, maternal negativity has little place in the lives of women. However, in times of scarcity and/or when women are unsupported, negative feelings can emerge to color the emotional palette and behavior of mothers.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“We humans are complex creatures and we live multifaceted lives; there is rarely a single reason for any aspect of what we feel or for how we behave.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“In contemporary developed countries, loneliness has been described as an epidemic caused by the loss of traditional social connectivity and a reliance on technology. Therefore, it seems likely that the Alzheimer's disease risk factors of social isolation and loneliness were less prevalent in the past.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Drug use has been found in all human societies throughout historical and prehistorical times, as well as being evident in closely related species. These observations warrant serious evolutionary exploration.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The domestication of plants in the Neolithic Revolution with the move from hunting and gathering to farming led to large-scale cultivation of various plants and hence greater potential availability of plant toxins than could have been present in the wild.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The Sexual Competition Hypothesis is based on the fact that throughout human evolutionary history the female shape has been a reliable indicator of the female's reproductive history and reproductive potential. The same is not true for men, where physical appearance, while relevant, is much less useful in assessing a man's reproductive potential. The visual signal for a female's peak reproductive potential in ancestral environments was the female's nubile shape, which was generally short-lived and declined with the repeated cycles of gestation and lactation.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“In place of a process that 'others' distressed people, we can look for ways to 'belong' them. For sure they do belong, and the belonging begins on a vast scale. As a regular human being, having inherited protections that kept every one of their ancestors alive at least long enough to start a family, the patient can consider themselves well equipped to handle, in their own time and in their own way, whatever lies ahead. They possess a genius for survival that has accumulated over countless generations; in this real sense, all of their fore -fathers and mothers- are on their side.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“To understand mismatch, we should note that the human lineage lived for 99% of its evolutionary history in relatively small, mobile, foraging, kin-based groups. It is under these conditions that human psychological mechanisms were shaped by selection. The seeds for mismatch were sown with the advent of agriculture, which resulted in permanently settled living around 10,000 - 20,000 years ago, and this radically altered the human physical and social environment with major implications for eating disorders EDs.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“To understand mismatch, we should note that yhe human lineage lived for 99% of its evolutionary history in relatively small, mobile, foraging, kin-based groups. It is under these conditions that human psychological mechanisms were shaped by selection. The seeds for mismatch were sown with the advent of agriculture, which resulted in permanently settled living around 10,000 - 20,000 years ago, and this radically altered the human physical and social environment with major implications for eating disorders EDs.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The epidemiological evidence for sexual dimorphism in humans is extensive. Sexual dimorphism in body composition is already evident in infancy: males tend to be heavier than females at birth and have longer bodies and larger head circumferences. By early adulthood, sexual dimorphism in fat distribution is highly evident.
These are the evolutionary roots of male sensitivity to visual cues of female physical attractiveness and also of women's motivation to display, preserve and improve their physical attractiveness and thus increase their perceived mate value. The extreme end of this adaptation gives rise to the risk of EDs in the modern environment.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Depression can also serve as a signal for the abandoner that the relationship was important to the abandoned person. It may arouse so much empathy in the abandoner that they return to the relationship.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Any animal aware that it could relieve its suffering by ending its own life would be expected to seize the opportunity. By this light, suicide can be understood as the default human response to intolerable distress.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“The first, pian, is an ancient self-protective signal that enables animals to navigate fitness hazards in their external and internal environments. The aversiveness of pain is designed precisely to induce action to end or escape it. The second suicidogenic adaptation is the exceptional intellect of the mature brain, which is able to obey the imperative to escape pain, effectively but maladaptively, by terminating its own consciousness. These dual 'pain' and 'brain' conditions - motivation and means, respectively - are not only necessary for deliberate self-killing but sufficient.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“...the environment of evolutionary adaptedness is a statistical composite of the adaptation-relevant properties of ancestral environments.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Evolution by natural selection tends generally to promote adaptations up to the edge of chaos -the boundary between order and disorder. Where all fitness-relevant regularities have been subsumed, what remains is noise, devoid of predictive utility.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“Suicides are the residue left after the human brain has done the best it can with the information to hand.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health

“...there may be observable patterns at a macro level, individual suicides can be understood as outputs of a chaotic system, or mental accidents. They ought to be -predictable unpredictable-.”
― Riadh Abed, Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health