Promotional Information

A founder of the field of evolutionary medicine uses his decades of experience as a psychiatrist to provide a much-needed new framework for making sense of mental illness.

About the Author

Randolph Nesse is an American physician, a founder of evolutionary medicine, and co-author with George C. Williams of the acclaimed Why We Get Sick. After a long career as a Professor of Psychiatry and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Nesse moved in 2014 to become the Founding Director of the Center for Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University, where he is also a professor in the School of Life Sciences.

Reviews

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.
*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.
*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.
*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*