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Anxiety Disorders as Evolutionary Adaptations

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Religious Beliefs, Evolutionary Psychiatry, and Mental Health in America

Part of the book series: Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach ((RELSPHE,volume 1))

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Abstract

The chapter examines the thesis, first advanced by clinical psychologists and psychiatrists in the 1970s and 1980s, that psychiatric symptoms are rooted in our evolution history. This premise has come to be called Evolutionary Psychiatry. Key among the early advocates of evolutionary psychiatry was the American psychiatrist Randolph M. Nesse who believed that many psychiatric disorders, particularly anxiety disorders, are expressions of proximate mechanisms that are adaptive for survival. This chapter explains how seven anxiety disorders reflect fears that evolved to protect us from different sources of dangers: acrophobia, agoraphobia, small animal phobias, general anxiety, society phobia (anxiety), panic attack, and obsessive compulsive disorder. The prevalence rates and age of onset of subclinical levels of these classes of psychiatric symptoms in the general public are presented wherever possible, and estimates are given regarding when some of the proximate mechanisms underlying these symptoms probably evolved in our animal or human ancestors. The chapter also explains that these proximate mechanisms are prone to making “false alarms,” much as smoke alarms do, because they operate under the “better safe than sorry principle.” A major point of the chapter is the same as the major premise of evolutionary psychiatry, i.e., that all people have subclinical levels of various psychiatric symptoms because the proximate mechanisms that produce them once were and may still be important for survival. The chapter also notes that the theoretical focus of evolutionary psychology on the last 1.8 million years of human existence is obviously inadequate for understanding how tens of millions and hundreds millions of years of evolution have molded human behavior.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The descriptions of the types of threat generally paraphrase Nesse’s descriptions and take into account the different descriptions he used in his 1990 and 1998 papers, as well as descriptions offered by other theorists about some of these threats.

  2. 2.

    The nervous system is divided into two parts: the central nervous system (which is located entirely within the skull and spinal cord), and the peripheral nervous system. The peripheral nervous system is further divided into two parts, the somatic and the autonomic nervous systems. The somatic nervous system controls the skeletal muscles and the autonomic nervous system regulates the internal organs and controls their related muscles.

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  1. Center for Psychosocial Research, Massapequa, NY, USA

    Kevin J. Flannelly

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Flannelly, K.J. (2017). Anxiety Disorders as Evolutionary Adaptations. In: Religious Beliefs, Evolutionary Psychiatry, and Mental Health in America. Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52488-7_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52488-7_11

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