Evolving Psychiatry

Are mental disorders such as ADHD 'real'? Should we be using medication? Sami Timimi comes from a 'critical psychiatry' perspective which questions these fundamental assumptions in psychiatry. Dr Sami Timimi is a retired consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and author. A Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, he has been one of the UK’s most promine...

Working out the evolved structure of the mind will have implications across therapy and society. Which directions are most promising? Daniel J. Glass, PhD, is a board-certified clinical psychologist whose clinical work focuses on anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias, and evidence-based psychotherapies, including cognitive behavioural therapy, exposure-based approaches, and acceptance-ba...

What paths to becoming an evolutionary psychiatrist exist? How could anyone train in this field? In this episode, Liam Callico interviews Adam Hunt on his history and the pathways into and forward for the field. Adam Hunt, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Evolution, Mental Health and Behaviour lab at the University of Cambridge. He is also Founding Chair of the Foundation for Evolution and...

Sport, and particularly football, captures billions of people's support. Why are our psychologies so captivated by these games? And could they even be used for improving mental health? The guests today are co-authors on the paper "The people’s game: evolutionary perspectives on the behavioural neuroscience of football fandom".Henry O’Connell is a returning guest: he is a consultant p...

Cathedrals and bridges could be built before physics was developed, but the limits of engineering eventually hit a wall. This episode considers how the science of physics eventually informed engineering, and the comparison to how evolution could inform psychiatry. Adam Hunt, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Evolution, Mental Health and Behaviour lab at the University of Cambridge. He is al...

How do clinical psychologists think differently once taking an evolutionary view? How can the evolutionary sciences help in understanding the problems people seek help from therapists for? Simone Cheli, PsyD, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist based in Florence, Italy. He is the founding president of Tages Onlus, a Florence-based clinical, research, and training centre he establis...

Mental disorder diagnosis has increased rapidly in recent decades, and now with the introduction of AI, possibilities for treatment are changing. Where will AI assistants fit into psychiatry and clinical psychology? Allen Frances, born 1942 in New York City, is Professor and Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine. He trained at Columbia (BA), SUNY Downstate (MD), the...

Neuroscience is the flagship science of psychiatry, but hasn't led to the advances expected from it. In this episode, Adam discusses difficulties with neuroscience and possibilities for switching to a paradigm that can actually make progress. Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University o...

Evolutionary theories are indeed... theories. But are they 'just' theories, in the derogatory sense? Or are they something more... In this episode Adam discusses this question. Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge. Since 2019 he has served on the executive committ...

What different explanatory frameworks can make sense of depression? And what are their respective impacts? Daniel Nettle is a behavioural scientist whose work bridges psychology, evolution, and public health. He a researcher in the Evolution and Social Cognition team at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris as well as a Professor at Northumbria University. Much of his most recent research has examined ho...

Evolutionary perspectives on ADHD are often talked about: Annie Swanepoel shares how they affect her practice as a psychiatrist, and what evolutionary perspectives in general mean for the field. Dr Annie Swanepoel is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist in North East London NHS Foundation Trust and holds a PhD in Human Physiology. She has played a longstanding role in the evolutionary psychiatry sp...

Why do we get depressed? Is depression really functional? In this episode, Adam discusses an overarching hypothesis which captures many existing evolutionary hypotheses: that depression's original function is to disengage us from life. Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambr...

Why does low mood, and at extreme, depression, exist? What is its function? James Turner is a postdoctoral researcher at Umeå University. He completed his PhD in Philosophy in 2024 at the University of Sheffield; the title of his thesis was : Low mood: Evolution, Cognition and Disorder. He has a general research interest in cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and the philosophy of psychiatry....

New results show that clinicians respond positively to evolutionary explanations of anxiety. In this episode, Adam and Tom discuss some of the findings of their study "Clinicians' attitudes to evolutionary and genetic explanations for anxiety: a cluster-randomised study of stigmatisation". It is available to read here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/4kwrb_v2Tom Carpenter is a psychiatrist regis...

Why dating apps can't last; defeating negative thinking; and exposure to sensible risk. Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair is a Clinical Psychologist and a Professor of Personality Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He is Editor-in-Chief of the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology and was the Head of the Department of Psychology at NTNU. Kennair is an elected member of...

A special episode on how evolutionary psychiatry and medicine came to be. Randolph Nesse, father of the field, gives an overview of his background, what it was like having to try and build a field before the internet, and the people who helped him along the way...Dr. Randolph “Randy” Nesse is a physician-scientist who helped launch the field of evolutionary medicine, showing how asking why our bod...

Stories abound in evolutionary psychology and psychiatry. How do we test them? In this third and final episode in this special series, Adam Hunt presents a way to standardise evolutionary hypothesis testing to make it more rigorous, reliable and systematic. The article is available, open access, here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/brv.70010 A summary blog post can be found here:...

Trying to explain disorders as functional is tempting, but often misses a critical point: sometimes it is not the disorder itself which is functional, but it is occurring as a by-product of a different adaptive system. In this second part of this special three part series, Adam Hunt explains this common confusion and the steps we can take to solve it. The article which this episode is based on is...

Evolution has already happened, and we don't have a time machine: how can we test hypotheses about that process? This is a criticism raised since Darwin's time. In this special three part series, Adam Hunt presents his article which aims to make progress on this scientific methodology by providing an improved framework for evolutionary inference. This episode kicks off by giving the histor...

Social media is bad for mental health right? Well... it's more complicated than that. In this episode, we discuss the ways in which novel digital technologies can also improve mental health, and how an evolutionary perspective on tech helps illuminate its dual effects of harming and healing. Tanay Katiyar is a PhD student, co-supervised by Amy Orben and Nikhil Chaudhary, at the MRC Cognition a...

Did mental disorders evolve to provide benefits to the community around us? Well, maybe, but these sorts of explanations could be criticised as naive 'group selection'. In this episode Adam goes into the nuance of understanding how evolution actually works in this common area of debate. Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leverhulme Center f...

Why did the human species evolve autism? What about different forms of autism? How does an evolutionary perspective align with the neurodiversity movement? Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge. Since 2019 he has served on the executive committee of the Evolutionary Psychi...

Why do autism and schizophrenia exist? What are 'fast and slow' life history strategies? What are controversies and opportunities facing the field of evolutionary psychiatry? In this episode, we go deep with Marco Del Giudice... Dr. Marco Del Giudice is an Associate Professor in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Trieste, Italy. His interdisciplinary research sits at the...

Humans rely on each other. Mothers, in particular, need help raising children. In this episode we discuss Professor Alessandra Cassar's work seeking to understand how maternal depression relates to gaining social support. We also touch on where evolutionary perspectives may be useful in structuring society more widely. Alessandra Cassar is a professor of economics at the University of San Francisc...

Why have humans evolved tendencies for substance addiction? In this episode, Adam and Tom discuss the evolutionary explanations for these vulnerabilities. The discussion is based on their paper "Evolutionary perspectives on substance and behavioural addictions: Distinct and shared pathways to understanding, prediction and prevention". Dr Tom Carpenter is a resident doctor in Psychiatry based in NH...