Grundsätzliches zur Konzeption einer evolutionären Psychiatrie

Abstract

Phenomenological, biological and aspects of psychiatric disorders lack an integrative metatheoretical framework. This paper reviews the foundations of evolutionary psychiatry. Many aspects of evolutionary psychiatry are largely based on the fitness theory. Since many biologists argue that the unit of selection is the gene rather than the single organism or a group of organisms, the of inclusive fitness embraces the fitness of an individual plus the fitness of his or her close relatives with whom the individual on average shares a calculable proportion of genes, depending on how close the relationship actually is. Reciprocal altruism, parental investment in relation to sexual selection, and parent-offspring conflict constitute specific problems that guide the evolution of psychological mechanisms and strategies of an organism especially in terms of its behaviour. Such problems have probably contributed to the evolution of the human social brain that developed in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness to solve problems of adaptive significance of ancestral conditions. Despite this seemingly gene-centred view, evolutionary psychiatry may be understood as a metatheory to integrate genetic understanding and causal explanation of psychopathological processes, including neurobiological and psychological findings, because it takes both, the ultimate and the proximate level of evolved cognitive capacities, emotion and behaviour, into account. Many psychiatric disorders may therefore be considered as dysfunctions of the social brain. This could be exemplified by disorders that are characterised by a compromised capacity for inferring the mental states of other individuals, referred to as theory of mind. In real-life situations mental state attribution usually interferes with affective cues which is, for instance, crucial for experience and behaving empathetically. In many severe psychiatric disorders the lack of empathy may therefore at least in part explain why the competence of patients suffering from schizophrenia, for example, is reduced. Although gender-specific differences in prevalence rates and symptomatology of psychiatric disorders are mentioned in the diagnostic manuals of psychiatric disorders to some extent, it is widely underrecognised that some of these differences emerged due to divergent problems of adaptation for men and women. Likewise, some concepts of psychoanalytic such as the Oedipus complex are inconsistent with evolutionary psychiatry. From an evolutionary point of view there is no such conflict between offspring and same-sex parent, however, parents and offspring disagree over the amount of parental investment, e.g. in terms of resource allocation and investment in potential other offspring. Many insights from evolutionary psychology and psychiatry are therefore also therapeutically neglected but may open new opportunities for empirical research.