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- By looking at the biological bases of human behavior, psychologists are better able to understand how the brain and physiological processes might influence the way people think, act, and feel. This perspective also allows researchers to come up with new treatments that target the biological influences on psychological well-being.
www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-biological-perspective-2794878
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It is inarguable that mental health phenomena have a basis in biology, and that most (but not all) should be classified as biological dysfunctions. The track record of biological psychiatry, however, a field that investigates the neurophysiological and genetic bases of mental disorders, is poor.
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Mental health and substance use Nutritional and infectious...
- Mental Health is Biological Health
Mental health and substance use Nutritional and infectious...
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- Genetic trade-offs
- From adaptive to maladaptive
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Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights From the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry Randolph M. Nesse Dutton (2019)
Globally, the burden of depression and other mental-health conditions is on the rise. In North America and Europe alone, mental illness accounts for up to 40% of all years lost to disability. And molecular medicine, which has seen huge success in treating diseases such as cancer, has failed to stem the tide. Into that alarming context enters the thought-provoking Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, in which evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse offers insights that radically reframe psychiatric conditions.
In his view, the roots of mental illnesses, such as anxiety and depression, lie in essential functions that evolved as building blocks of adaptive behavioural and cognitive function. Furthermore, like the legs of thoroughbred racehorses — selected for length, but tending towards weakness — some dysfunctional aspects of mental function might have originated with selection for unrelated traits, such as cognitive capacity. Intrinsic vulnerabilities in the human mind could be a trade-off for optimizing unrelated features.
Decades earlier, the evolutionary theorist George C. Williams explored perhaps the most perplexing aspect of human biology: our inconvenient tendency to age and die. He suggested in 1957 that some of the genes that cause ageing evolved because they enhanced fitness early in life (G. C. Williams Evolution 11, 398–411; 1957). Such ‘antagonistic pleiotropy’ — in which a single gene controls at least one beneficial and one detrimental trait — suggests that the design of biological structures is a complex optimization problem involving multiple trade-offs. Emotions and other aspects of mental function are not like machine components, each with a set function; instead, they are embedded in complex overlapping biochemical pathways.
In 1994, Nesse teamed up with Williams for Why We Get Sick, a manifesto for “Darwinian medicine”. Their insights opened up new perspectives on the origins of diseases, arguing for ‘proximate’ causes (driven by anatomy, biochemistry and physiology) and higher-level ‘ultimate’ (evolutionary) causes. They noted that evolution selects for reproductive success rather than for health and happiness; hence, the existence of human diseases and disorders. They also detailed the contingent and sometimes ‘irrational’ nature of biological legacies, such as the nerves and blood vessels that run across the human eye’s retinal surface. Cephalopod eyes don’t have this ‘flaw’.
Good Reasons for Bad Feelings builds on these insights. Adopting an “engineers’ point of view” on mental illnesses, Nesse suggests that anxiety, although apparently undesirable, is a design component with utility in certain situations — for instance, as a “smoke detector” for potentially life-threatening events. Depression might also perform adaptive functions. The psychiatrist Aubrey Lewis argued that by signalling distress, depression could prompt others into providing assistance through foraging and other activities. It has even been suggested that depressive behaviour in vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) evolved to signal loss of status, deflecting attacks from dominant males.
Yet, however functional its components when appropriately regulated, mental illnesses cause suffering, and evidence-based treatments are sparse. Indeed, the field has seen no significant pharmaceutical breakthroughs for many years. Biological causes remain elusive, and biomarkers non-existent.
Nesse argues that evolutionary theory could foster therapeutic breakthroughs by providing a robust theoretical foundation for psychiatry. He posits that it might also help to prevent people from equating psychiatric symptoms with diseases and viewing extremes of emotion such as anxiety as disorders. Nesse also suggests that mental illnesses might result from the disruption of regulators that maintain equilibrium in the body, such as the endocrine system. The normally adaptive function of thoughts and emotions could, in such instances, become maladaptive.
The future success of clinical psychiatry might depend on an evolutionary framework being integrated with whole-genome sequence-data analysis; this could help to identify mutations predisposing people to mental illness. Given the small contributions of individual genes and the diverse mechanisms involved, this will demand analysis of the genomes of hundreds of thousands of people. As a result of the extensive and often paradoxical entanglement of genetic networks, future treatments might, by necessity, require mental circuits to be engineered to release them from hard-wired evolutionary constraints.
In Theodicy (1710), German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz argued that God, being omniscient, must have created the best of all possible worlds. (Fifty years later, in his novel Candide, Voltaire lampooned Leibniz as Doctor Pangloss, who opined that faults in the world are necessary, like contrasting shadows in a painting.)
Ironic readings aside, the philosopher’s optimism might now be shown to have rational echoes in contemporary science. As Good Reasons for Bad Feelings boldly posits, many of the core dysfunctional components of mental illness ultimately help to make us human.
Nature 566, 180-181 (2019)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00521-2
- Adrian Woolfson
- 2019
Jan 6, 2022 · Consistent with this understanding that psychiatric symptoms are rooted in biology, modern pharmacotherapies are developed to engage specific molecular targets. But although the treatments we prescribe are biologically based, psychiatrists deploy them blind to our patients’ biology.
Feb 24, 2009 · The current experiments examine mental health clinicians’ beliefs about biological, psychological, and environmental bases of the DSM-IV-TR mental disorders and the consequences of those causal beliefs for judging treatment effectiveness.
- Woo-kyoung Ahn, Caroline C. Proctor, Elizabeth H. Flanagan
- 2009
Nov 1, 2013 · The biomedical model posits that mental disorders are brain diseases and emphasizes pharmacological treatment to target presumed biological abnormalities. A biologically-focused approach to science, policy, and practice has dominated the American healthcare system for more than three decades.
- Brett J. Deacon
- 2013
May 11, 2020 · The Biological Classification of Mental Disorders (BeCOME) study aims to identify biology-based classes of mental disorders that improve the translation of novel biomedical findings into tailored clinical applications.
The first 3 refer to the personal factors that influence mental health — the nature part. The latter refers to the contextual factors — the nurture part. This is the first of a 3-part series delving into the influence of nature and nurture on mental health.
