Psychiatry’s Future as a Science-based Interventional Social Psychiatry

Abstract

Conditions of living and evolved human social traits undermine human adaptations to genetic, personal, social, and physical environments. The objectives of this study were as follows: first, to identify the functionality of evolutionary impediments to human health, well-being, happiness, and survival, and second, to understand the role, potentials, rationale, methods, structures, and implementation of possible responses by social psychiatry. The author surveyed the background mission development of Hippocratic medicine to identify the ranges of responsibility historically available to social psychiatry research, training, and practice addressing the conditions of living left by evolution for Homo sapiens. Topics examined for relevance included a history of Hippocratic medicine, evolutionary biology, primatological studies of human social primates, medical sciences, and psychosocial sciences. The results achieved were: Blind processes of evolution, through natural selection, have left to H. sapiens numerous and wide-ranging specific impediments to effective adaptations to the environments essential to humans flourishing and surviving. Consequently, functioning solely to ensure the survival of live forms across generations, evolution has left individuals without rights and totally responsible for the consequences of how they live. It can be concluded that human evolutionary biology provides a required broad and informative grounding for social psychiatric research and the development of the understanding and interventions required to reverse the effects from evolved conditions and traits affecting human adaptations. Serendipitously, direct democracy may be the sole form of social governance able to functionally accommodate humans’ dynamically unique individuality. Medicine’s formulation as a social intervention by Rudolf Wirchov, where William Osler finds physicians learning the pragmatics of applying scientific knowledge, provides a millennia-long tradition addressing the parson’s and population’s best interests. This may prove an essential grounding for any effective interventions against human-evolved conditions and traits.