The Uses of Madness: Essays on Darwinism and Psychiatry

Mental illnesses have been around for ages. One of the oldest medical documents, the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus, for example, already mentions forms of madness that we would now call depression and psychosis. Moreover, mental illnesses are hereditary. This means that our genes play a role in one way or another in our susceptibility to such disorders. And finally, mental illnesses affect the social and sexual lives of the individuals who suffer from them. Mental illnesses therefore confront us with a strange Darwinian incongruity. How is it possible that the genes that play a role in our susceptibility to such illnesses have managed to escape natural selection for all this time? Can we not expect that these genes would disappear from the gene pool over time? Or do mental illnesses perhaps also have unknown advantages? In order to unravel this riddle, a brand-new Darwinian discipline has emerged in recent decades: evolutionary psychiatry.
The Usefulness of Madness is a critical introduction to this surprising discipline, and is aimed at a broad audience of laymen and specialists who are in one way or another interested in the wonderful world of psychiatry.