Bookstore

'A new approach to mental disorder. Randolph Nesse's insightful book suggests that conditions such as anxiety and depression have a clear evolutionary purpose ... This intriguing book turns some age-old questions about the human condition upside down' Tim Adams, Observer

One of the world's most respected psychiatrists provides a much-needed new evolutionary framework for making sense of mental illness

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 with fragile minds at all.

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. Other mental disorders, such as addiction and anorexia, result from the mismatch between modern environments and our ancient human past. 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. Nesse's book offers fresh thinking in a field that has come to feel stagnant * The Financial Times * A compelling case for locating mental illness within an evolutionary frame-work . . . an excellent and timely account of the history, development andimplications of evolutionary psychiatry. -- Frank Tallis * The Evening Standard * This is a wise, accessible, highly readable exploration of an issue that goes to the heart of human existence. -- Robert M. Sapolsky, author of Behave This intriguing book turns some age-old questions about the human condition upside down . . . In an engaging, storytelling voice that rests on 30 years of clinical practice, he offers a series of insights. * The Observer * Insights that radically reframe psychiatric conditions ... As Good Reasons for Bad Feelings boldly posits, many of the core dysfunctional components of mental illness ultimately help to make us human. -- Adrian Woolfson * Nature * Using [...] fascinating insights, Nesse suggests novel and revolutionary ways to treat mental illness. * The Daily Mail * [Nesse's] basic conception of the mind feels like good, common sense. * The Sunday Times * All psychiatrists and patients who find themselves having occasional "bad feelings" about our current understanding of mental illness will have many "good reasons" to consult this book. I do fully expect that someday nearly all psychiatry will be identified as evolutionary psychiatry. If so, Randolph Nesse's book should be seen as the field's founding document. -- David P. Barash * The Wall Street Journal * Highly accessible, scholarly and deeply illuminating . . . this will become a treasured classic; not just for clinicians but for all those interested in how to facilitate well-being and create more moral communities and societies. -- Professor Paul Gilbert OBE, author of Compassionate Mind, and Living like Crazy Two sets of ideas inform this fine book: one, the cold-hearted logic of natural selection; the other, the practical wisdom of a compassionate psychiatrist. The tension is palpable. The result is riveting. -- Nicholas Humphrey, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, London School of Economics, author of Soul Dust A personalized and lively but well documented treatise on how we humans function and on needed changes in the way psychiatry thinks about troublesome mental experiences and behavior. . . . Many readers will find it hard to put the book down. -- Eric Klinger, Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Minnesota Those powerful feelings that fill our day, that give us the oomph to act one way or another are the guardrails to living and this wonderful books explains all of them. Randolph Nesse has done it again. -- Michael S. Gazzaniga, Director, Sage Center, UC Santa Barbara A book as wise and illuminating as it is relevant to our daily lives. -- Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, author of The Woman that Never Evolved and Mother Nature In this very accessible book, Nesse explains how an evolutionary framework can be to psychiatry
what physiology is to the rest of medicine. Evolutionary science bridges the gap between
neuroscience and the environment. * Royal College of Psychiatrists newsletter * A bold book that would have made Darwin proud. Cutting-edge and compassionate at the same time. -- Lee Dugatkin, Professor of Biology, University of Louisville, co-author of How to Tame a Fox and Build a Dog It is no exaggeration to say that Nesse opens the door to a new paradigm in thinking about human beings and their conflicted lives. A pathbreaking book by a man who is truly humane and caring. A privilege to share time with him. -- Michael Ruse, Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy, Florida State University, author of On Purpose Randolph Nesse, who trained psychiatrists for many years, has for a quarter century been a key leader of evolutionary medicine. Good Reasons for Bad Feelings integrates these two strands of his life and thought in a readable, insightful book, as much a philosophy of emotions as it is a new window on mental illness. All who want to know themselves should read it. -- Melvin Konner, Dobbs Professor of Anthropology, Emory University, author of The Tangled Wing Randolph Nesse is one of the key architects of evolutionary medicine. He's been an inspiration to a generation of scientists, who explore evolution to understand why we get sick from diseases ranging from cancer to obesity to infectious diseases. Now Nesse has turned his attention from the body to the mind, in a provocative book full of intriguing explanations about human nature in all its strengths and weaknesses. -- Carl Zimmer, author of She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity A masterful, groundbreaking book that persuasively challenges standard clinical wisdom and provides a roadmap for the transformation of our conceptually confused psychiatric nosology . . . Anyone interested in mental health-laypeople, students, clinicians, and scholars-will be grateful for the novel insights to be gained from this important book. The distillation of decades of pathbreaking contributions to evolutionary psychiatry, this book will be an influential watershed in the mental health field, and a worthy successor to Nesse's earlier celebrated book on medical disease. If joy is indeed a biologically programmed emotional response motivating us to take advantage of unexpected bounty and opportunity, then every reader will experience joy in reading Randy Nesse's beautifully written, profound book. -- Jerome C. Wakefield, Professor of Psychiatry, New York University, co-author of The Loss of Sadness Randolph Nesse's book Why We Get Sick put evolutionary medicine on the map. His follow-up, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, promises to transform our understanding of mental illnesses in the same way. * New Scientist * Randolph Nesse's new book ... is clear and engaging, and the narrative reflects a masterful blend of history, novel ideas, and clinical experience in an insightful and coherent manner. I hope it is widely read and discussed. -- Eric Charnov, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Evolutionary Ecology, University of Utah, MacArthur Fellow What is the nature of suffering, its origin and its adaptive significance? Good Reason

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry