with our family and others with whom we initially come in contact. As humans, we also develop societal and cultural perspectives. These perspectives become the backdrop of our environment. Unlike animals that live within nature, we as humans largely live within the backdrop of our culture. Thus, we are influenced by our culture and pay close attention to it.
Human infants are helpless at birth.
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Many species are able to function on their own shortly after birth.
Doug Cheeseman/Photolibrary/Getty Images
Another part of our complexity as humans is our ability to reflect on ourselves and our world. In this way, a layer of thought can be injected between the person and the environment. This allows for expectation and imagination to play a role in human behavior and experience. Some have even suggested that humans may be the only species to imagine the world and themselves differently from how they appear. In this sense, our inner world of thoughts and feelings becomes another environment in which we live. For example, you can tell yourself you are wonderful or you are stupid, and there is no one inside you to dispute this. One positive aspect of this is that your inner world allows you to plan future actions and reflect on past ones, but it can also be experienced as distress when your internal thoughts reflect such states as anxiety or hopelessness. Our internal thoughts at times may lead to interpretations of the environment or ourselves that may not be productive. This adaptive human ability to reflect, which should lead to successful survival, sexuality, and social relations, sometimes leads instead to interactions that reduce the close connection between the individual and his or her internal and external environment. As we will see, this lack of connectedness lies at the heart of psychopathology.
As noted in Chapter 1, humans not only consider themselves but also consider others. A positive side of this is the ability to understand the internal experiences of another. This allows us to experience empathy. We can also consider how we appear to others and other questions of self-image. One aspect of this is related to sexual processes. That is, we can say or do things that make us more attractive to a potential mate. In terms of self-preservation, humans also have a personal history that allows each individual to learn from the past and develop strategies for living. These strategies tend to protect us and may even have saved our lives in exceptional cases. However, it is also possible for the strategies that work in one environmental situation not to work in another. When a person loses contact with the current environment and applies strategies that worked perhaps in an earlier time, then unsuccessful adaptation is the result.
This lack of connectedness to our environment may take place on both an external and an internal level. On an external level, the person finds herself different from the group or even seeks to be separate from others. This is not our historical experience, since individual humans have never lived in isolation. As a species, we have always lived in close contact with other humans, which has led to the development of societies and cultures. In fact, many of the specific abilities of humans are geared to social interactions on a variety of levels. When they no longer have the connection with the group, many individuals experience a sense of loss. This loss typically carries with it the experience of negative affect and depression and often a need to withdraw from contact with others and even themselves. On an internal level, humans frequently have the need to explain to themselves the events that have just occurred, which may include anger, distorted perceptions, or a genuine plan for recovery. The extreme cases we refer to as psychopathology.
Psychopathology From an Evolutionary Perspective
Psychopathology from an evolutionary perspective goes beyond the traditional psychological and physiological considerations. Considering the evolutionary perspective, we ask additional types of questions. One question might be, how long in terms of our human history has a particular psychopathological disorder existed? As noted in Chapter 1, a WHO study examined the presence of schizophrenia in a number of countries with very different racial and cultural backgrounds (Sartorius et al., 1986). What these authors found was that despite the different cultural and racial backgrounds surveyed, the experience of schizophrenia was remarkably similar across countries. Likewise, the risk of developing schizophrenia was similar in terms of total population presence (about 1%). Further, the disorder had a similar time course in its occurrence, with its characteristics first being seen in young adults.
If you put these facts together, it suggests that schizophrenia is a disorder that has always been part of the human experience. Because it is found throughout the world in strikingly similar ways, this suggests that it existed before humans migrated out of Africa. The genes related to schizophrenia were carried by early humans who migrated from Africa, and thus, its presence is equally likely throughout the world. Given these estimates as to the history of the disorder, one might ask why schizophrenia continues to exist. We know, for example, that individuals with schizophrenia tend to have fewer children than individuals without the disorder. Fewer children with these genes would over time lead to even fewer children with the genes. Thus, we might assume that schizophrenia would have disappeared over evolutionary time in that it reduces reproductive success and has a genetic component. However, this is not the case.
This creates a mystery for evolutionary psychologists to solve. In order to answer this question, we can draw on many considerations. Perhaps, in the same way that sickle-cell anemia is associated with a protection against malaria, schizophrenia protects the person from another disorder. Or, perhaps like the reaction of rats to stress, which results in depression-like symptoms, the symptoms seen in schizophrenia are the result of a long chain of stressful events in which the organism breaks down in its ability to function. Psychopathology could even go in a more positive direction and be associated with creative and nontraditional views of the world. For example, there are a number of accounts that have noted greater creativity in families of individuals with schizophrenia.
The evolutionary perspective helps us ask such questions as what function a disorder might serve as well as how it came about. In the same way that pain can be seen as a warning system to the body to protect it from tissue damage, anxiety may have evolved to protect the person from other types of potential threats. For example, many of the outward expressions of social anxiety parallel what is seen in dominance interactions in primates. Submissive monkeys avoid contact with most dominant ones in much the way that human individuals experiencing social anxiety avoid dominant members of their group. This suggests the possibility that anxiety may have its evolutionary origins in dominance structures. If this were the case, then we might expect to see some relationship to sexual instinctual processes—as is the case with dominance. The evolutionary perspective also helps us think about what might be solutions to how psychopathology should be treated. As touched on in Chapter 1, these are some of the questions I will discuss in this book.
One perspective of the evolutionary approach has been to redirect psychology back to the basic processes of human existence such as survival, sexual processes, and social behavior. We can then ask what types of disorders are found within each broad category. We can also consider the developmental and social processes and ask how these processes may be involved in psychopathology. Thinking in these terms, we may come to discover that disorders that have very similar end states may have developed from distinct beginning conditions. Depression, for example, can result from extreme stress that brings forth self-preservation instincts. Depression can also result from the loss of significant people in one’s life. Further, loss of social status is also associated with depression. Thus, what appear to be similar symptoms may have
