How Psychiatric Conditions Were Made

Information on the evolution of brain, culture, and adaptive behavior is discussed in order to explain why an amalgam of behavior and sickness, rather than “psyche” as ordinarily construed, constitutes the fabric which made up the psychiatric condition in evolving human groups. Limitations of the “harmful dysfunction” thesis and of related ideas of evolutionary psychologists about psychiatric condition are discussed. A hierarchical model of information-handling systems involved in brain and behavior relations is proposed as a way of better appreciating the importance of an integrative formulation of the psychiatric condition that incorporates visceral somatic disturbances and equates such conditions with sickness and maladaptation. Why and how a dualistic cultural bias about the “psyche” of psychiatric condition evolved is reviewed along with some of the problems it has conditioned involving the organization of contemporary medical and psychiatric practice.