Evolutionary psychiatry seeks to explain mental illness through human evolution. Developmental mechanisms such as anxiety, aggression, and worry may play significant roles. Environmental and social factors can also be considered. Evolutionary psychology is a related but distinct field.
Psychiatry is the study and treatment of the types of mental illnesses that people can suffer from. Evolutionary psychiatry is a specific type of medicine, in which the psychiatrist seeks explanations of diseases that concern human evolution. Examples of developmental mechanisms that may play significant roles in psychiatric illness include anxiety, worry and aggression.
Scientists in the field of evolutionary science look for the presence of evolutionary mechanisms in biology and behavior. Interest in sex and children is one mechanism that has evolved to ensure that humans produce the next generation. Behavior that promotes a person’s status relative to others can gain them greater access to money, possessions, and support, along with greater attractiveness to the opposite sex. Fear and worry have evolved to tell a person when they are in danger and how much effort to spend thinking about solutions.
Specialists in the field of developmental psychiatry may also consider social and environmental factors when considering a developmental factor in psychiatric illness. For example, a woman driven by an evolutionary mechanism to eat sweet and rich foods that are high in energy may also be influenced by society’s expectation of being thin, and as a result, may suffer from an eating disorder. A person growing up with certain cultural values, and pursuing those values in conflict with the laws of the nation in which he resides, can also be explained by developmental psychiatry, which recognizes that children are impressionable as infants with parental values.
Fear can be altered in a person suffering from conditions such as phobias. In these cases, an evolutionary psychiatrist can tie the natural fear to the specific situation that prompted the abnormal fear in the first place. He or she can also potentially use the data gleaned by neuroscientists to understand how the brain develops over a person’s lifetime and which triggers are most likely, from the perspective of developmental psychiatry, to trigger the development of the mental disorder.
Evolutionary psychology is another field of science related to evolutionary psychiatry, but it is a distinct field, albeit a more established one than the psychiatric field. Psychiatry in general focuses on the medical conditions that can affect people’s minds, while psychologists are interested in both the medical conditions of the mind and the normal functioning of the mind. Evolutionary psychologists are often academics, while evolutionary psychiatrists are physicians in practice.
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