Avsnitt
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Are mental disorders such as ADHD 'real'? Should we be using medication? Sami Timimi comes from a 'critical psychiatry' perspective which questions these fundamental assumptions in psychiatry.Dr Sami Timimi is a retired consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and author. A Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, he has been one of the UK’s most prominent voices in critical psychiatry, writing extensively on childhood, psychotherapy, psychiatric diagnosis, medicalisation, behavioural problems, and cross-cultural mental health. His books include Searching for Normal, Insane Medicine, Naughty Boys, and The Myth of Autism. His work challenges narrowly biomedical models of distress and argues for more contextual, relational, and culturally informed approaches to mental health care.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Working out the evolved structure of the mind will have implications across therapy and society. Which directions are most promising? Daniel J. Glass, PhD, is a board-certified clinical psychologist whose clinical work focuses on anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias, and evidence-based psychotherapies, including cognitive behavioural therapy, exposure-based approaches, and acceptance-based interventions. His academic interests centre on the application of evolutionary theory to clinical psychology, including how evolutionary perspectives may inform the understanding, classification, and treatment of mental disorders.Niruban Balachandran is co-leader of PsychTable, an open-science project dedicated to classifying and evaluating evidence for evolved psychological adaptations. His work focuses on organising claims about the evolved mind in a rigorous and transparent way, with relevance for psychology, public understanding, policy, and the broader behavioural sciences.Together, Daniel Glass and Niruban Balachandran bring complementary perspectives on the relationship between evolutionary theory and psychotherapy: one grounded in clinical practice, and the other in the systematic classification and evaluation of evolutionary psychological evidence.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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What paths to becoming an evolutionary psychiatrist exist? How could anyone train in this field? In this episode, Liam Callico interviews Adam Hunt on his history and the pathways into and forward for the field.
Adam Hunt, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Evolution, Mental Health and Behaviour lab at the University of Cambridge. He is also Founding Chair of the Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health, an Executive Committee Member of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Communications Chair for the International Society of Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, and host of the 'Evolving Psychiatry' podcast.
This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Sport, and particularly football, captures billions of people's support. Why are our psychologies so captivated by these games? And could they even be used for improving mental health?The guests today are co-authors on the paper "The people’s game: evolutionary perspectives on the behavioural neuroscience of football fandom".Henry O’Connell is a returning guest: he is a consultant psychiatrist and Clinical Director at HSE Portlaoise, Clinical Professor at the University of Limerick, founding chair of the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland's Evolutionary Psychiatry SIG, and now Co-Chair of the WPA Section on Evolutionary Psychiatry. He is also author of Evolution and Psychiatry: Clinical Cases. Matt Butler is the lead author of the key paper of today's episode. He's a Wellcome Doctoral Clinical Research Fellow at King's College London and a specialist registrar in psychiatry at South London & Maudsley hospitals. His PhD is on psilocybin in functional neurological disorder.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Cathedrals and bridges could be built before physics was developed, but the limits of engineering eventually hit a wall. This episode considers how the science of physics eventually informed engineering, and the comparison to how evolution could inform psychiatry.Adam Hunt, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Evolution, Mental Health and Behaviour lab at the University of Cambridge. He is also Founding Chair of the Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health, an Executive Committee Member of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Communications Chair for the International Society of Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, and host of the 'Evolving Psychiatry' podcast.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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How do clinical psychologists think differently once taking an evolutionary view? How can the evolutionary sciences help in understanding the problems people seek help from therapists for?Simone Cheli, PsyD, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist based in Florence, Italy. He is the founding president of Tages Onlus, a Florence-based clinical, research, and training centre he established in 2014, and an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at St. John's University, Rome. He previously spent fifteen years at the University of Florence working in psycho-oncology and severe mental illness.He is best known for developing Evolutionary Systems Therapy (ESTS), an integrative clinical model that brings together Paul Gilbert's Compassion-Focused Therapy, the metacognitive tradition of Paul Lysaker and Giancarlo Dimaggio, attachment theory, and evolutionary psychopathology. His research focuses on schizotypy, personality disorders, perfectionism, and the dimensional understanding of psychopathology, and he is a member of the HiTOP Consortium.He is the co-editor, with Paul Lysaker, of A Dimensional Approach to Schizotypy: Conceptualization and Treatment (Springer, 2023), and the author of the popular Italian book L'animale che si credeva altro: Guida facile alla psicologia evoluzionistica in sette storie (Fioriti, 2026). He has published over one hundred peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, and serves as co-editor of Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session and associate editor of New Ideas in Psychology and Mental Health Science.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Mental disorder diagnosis has increased rapidly in recent decades, and now with the introduction of AI, possibilities for treatment are changing. Where will AI assistants fit into psychiatry and clinical psychology? Allen Frances, born 1942 in New York City, is Professor and Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine. He trained at Columbia (BA), SUNY Downstate (MD), the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training. He chaired Duke's Department of Psychiatry from 1991 and previously spent two decades at Cornell, where he ran the outpatient department and founded a brief therapy program.He is best known for chairing the DSM-IV Task Force (DSM-IV, 1994; text revision, 2000) and, before that, for writing the personality disorders section of DSM-III under Robert Spitzer. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Personality Disorders and the Journal of Psychiatric Practice.His key publications include Saving Normal (2013), the international bestseller and his manifesto against diagnostic inflation; Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis (2013); and Twilight of American Sanity (2017). His August 2025 British Journal of Psychiatry editorial, "Warning: AI chatbots will soon dominate psychotherapy," is his most cited recent work, and he writes a weekly Psychiatric Times series on AI in mental health.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Neuroscience is the flagship science of psychiatry, but hasn't led to the advances expected from it. In this episode, Adam discusses difficulties with neuroscience and possibilities for switching to a paradigm that can actually make progress.Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge. Since 2019 he has served on the executive committee of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He also sits on the board of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health. He is the founding chair of the Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health. His PhD thesis entitled ‘Evolving Evolutionary Psychiatry and Explaining Neurodiversity’ received Summa Cumme Laude from the University of Zurich in spring 2024.He has published multiple academic articles in journals such as Biological Reviews, Autism Research and Evolutionary Human Sciences on a range of topics, including how evolutionary psychiatry supports the concept of neurodiversity and how evolutionary theory explains individual differences in cognition and dissolves the distinction between psychopathology and personality. He has lectured and trained psychiatrists and psychotherapists in evolutionary psychiatry.
This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Evolutionary theories are indeed... theories. But are they 'just' theories, in the derogatory sense? Or are they something more... In this episode Adam discusses this question.Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge. Since 2019 he has served on the executive committee of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He also sits on the board of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health. He is the founding chair of the Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health. His PhD thesis entitled ‘Evolving Evolutionary Psychiatry and Explaining Neurodiversity’ received Summa Cumme Laude from the University of Zurich in spring 2024.He has published multiple academic articles in journals such as Biological Reviews, Autism Research and Evolutionary Human Sciences on a range of topics, including how evolutionary psychiatry supports the concept of neurodiversity and how evolutionary theory explains individual differences in cognition and dissolves the distinction between psychopathology and personality. He has lectured and trained psychiatrists and psychotherapists in evolutionary psychiatry.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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What different explanatory frameworks can make sense of depression? And what are their respective impacts?
Daniel Nettle is a behavioural scientist whose work bridges psychology, evolution, and public health. He a researcher in the Evolution and Social Cognition team at the Institut Jean Nicod, Paris as well as a Professor at Northumbria University. Much of his most recent research has examined how poverty, inequality, and social environments shape behaviour and mental health. He’s the author several books, including Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile and Personality: What Makes You the Way You Are, as well as a wide range of academic articles and research relating to evolutionary psychiatry, including on schizophrenia, early life stressors, depression and interpretation of different explanatory frameworks of mental disorder.
This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Evolutionary perspectives on ADHD are often talked about: Annie Swanepoel shares how they affect her practice as a psychiatrist, and what evolutionary perspectives in general mean for the field.Dr Annie Swanepoel is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist in North East London NHS Foundation Trust and holds a PhD in Human Physiology. She has played a longstanding role in the evolutionary psychiatry special interest group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, serving on the executive committee for many years, including being editor of the newsletter and finance officer. She has published multiple papers on evolution and ADHD.
The paper mentioned in this episode can be found here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/irish-journal-of-psychological-medicine/article/abs/evolutionary-perspectives-on-adhd/59AD1CA265F79F7EF978178361BC8E17
This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Why do we get depressed? Is depression really functional? In this episode, Adam discusses an overarching hypothesis which captures many existing evolutionary hypotheses: that depression's original function is to disengage us from life.Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge. Since 2019 he has served on the executive committee of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He also sits on the board of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health. He is the founding chair of the Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health. His PhD thesis entitled ‘Evolving Evolutionary Psychiatry and Explaining Neurodiversity’ received Summa Cumme Laude from the University of Zurich in spring 2024.He has published multiple academic articles in journals such as Biological Reviews, Autism Research and Evolutionary Human Sciences on a range of topics, including how evolutionary psychiatry supports the concept of neurodiversity and how evolutionary theory explains individual differences in cognition and dissolves the distinction between psychopathology and personality. He has lectured and trained psychiatrists and psychotherapists in evolutionary psychiatry.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Why does low mood, and at extreme, depression, exist? What is its function? James Turner is a postdoctoral researcher at Umeå University. He completed his PhD in Philosophy in 2024 at the University of Sheffield; the title of his thesis was : Low mood: Evolution, Cognition and Disorder.He has a general research interest in cognitive science, evolutionary theory, and the philosophy of psychiatry. In particular, He is interested in the evolution of low mood, the nature of physical and psychological function and dysfunction, and recently he has been dabbling in the philosophy of AI.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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New results show that clinicians respond positively to evolutionary explanations of anxiety. In this episode, Adam and Tom discuss some of the findings of their study "Clinicians' attitudes to evolutionary and genetic explanations for anxiety: a cluster-randomised study of stigmatisation". It is available to read here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/4kwrb_v2Tom Carpenter is a psychiatrist registrar in training in the West of Scotland, and a clinical lecturer at the University of Glasgow. He is the trainee representative on the executive committee of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Why dating apps can't last; defeating negative thinking; and exposure to sensible risk.
Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair is a Clinical Psychologist and a Professor of Personality Psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He is Editor-in-Chief of the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology and was the Head of the Department of Psychology at NTNU. Kennair is an elected member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters and was appointed to the Norwegian Cabinet Committee on Women’s Health. His research interests are diverse, focusing on the effective treatment of anxiety and depressive disorders, as well as evolutionary psychology. He applies Sexual Strategies Theory to explore topics such as jealousy, regret, sexual harassment, mate preferences, and the use of dating apps. A topic close to his heart is the mystery of the evolution of mental disorder.
This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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A special episode on how evolutionary psychiatry and medicine came to be. Randolph Nesse, father of the field, gives an overview of his background, what it was like having to try and build a field before the internet, and the people who helped him along the way...Dr. Randolph “Randy” Nesse is a physician-scientist who helped launch the field of evolutionary medicine, showing how asking why our bodies and minds are vulnerable can guide better care. After nearly 40 years on the psychiatry faculty at the University of Michigan, he moved to Arizona State University to found and direct the Center for Evolution & Medicine, where he continues as a research professor. Randy co-authored the landmark bestseller Why We Get Sick and, more recently, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings, which brings an evolutionary lens to mental health. He also founded the International Society for Evolution, Medicine & Public Health.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Stories abound in evolutionary psychology and psychiatry. How do we test them? In this third and final episode in this special series, Adam Hunt presents a way to standardise evolutionary hypothesis testing to make it more rigorous, reliable and systematic.
The article is available, open access, here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/brv.70010
A summary blog post can be found here: https://www.adamhunt.info/post/the-dcide-framework-published-in-biological-reviews
Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge. Since 2019 he has served on the executive committee of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He also sits on the board of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health. His PhD thesis entitled ‘Evolving Evolutionary Psychiatry and Explaining Neurodiversity’ received Summa Cumme Laude from the University of Zurich in spring 2024.
He has published multiple academic articles in journals such as Autism Research and Evolutionary Human Sciences on a range of topics, including how evolutionary psychiatry supports the concept of neurodiversity and how evolutionary theory explains individual differences in cognition and dissolves the distinction between psychopathology and personality. He has lectured and trained psychiatrists and psychotherapists in evolutionary psychiatry.
This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Trying to explain disorders as functional is tempting, but often misses a critical point: sometimes it is not the disorder itself which is functional, but it is occurring as a by-product of a different adaptive system. In this second part of this special three part series, Adam Hunt explains this common confusion and the steps we can take to solve it.
The article which this episode is based on is available, open access, here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/brv.70010
A summary blog post can be found here: https://www.adamhunt.info/post/the-dcide-framework-published-in-biological-reviews
Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge. Since 2019 he has served on the executive committee of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He also sits on the board of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health. His PhD thesis entitled ‘Evolving Evolutionary Psychiatry and Explaining Neurodiversity’ received Summa Cumme Laude from the University of Zurich in spring 2024.
He has published multiple academic articles in journals such as Autism Research and Evolutionary Human Sciences on a range of topics, including how evolutionary psychiatry supports the concept of neurodiversity and how evolutionary theory explains individual differences in cognition and dissolves the distinction between psychopathology and personality. He has lectured and trained psychiatrists and psychotherapists in evolutionary psychiatry.
This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Evolution has already happened, and we don't have a time machine: how can we test hypotheses about that process? This is a criticism raised since Darwin's time. In this special three part series, Adam Hunt presents his article which aims to make progress on this scientific methodology by providing an improved framework for evolutionary inference. This episode kicks off by giving the history of the problem.
The article which this episode is based on is available, open access, here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/brv.70010
A summary blog post can be found here: https://www.adamhunt.info/post/the-dcide-framework-published-in-biological-reviews
Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge. Since 2019 he has served on the executive committee of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He also sits on the board of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health. His PhD thesis entitled ‘Evolving Evolutionary Psychiatry and Explaining Neurodiversity’ received Summa Cumme Laude from the University of Zurich in spring 2024.
He has published multiple academic articles in journals such as Autism Research and Evolutionary Human Sciences on a range of topics, including how evolutionary psychiatry supports the concept of neurodiversity and how evolutionary theory explains individual differences in cognition and dissolves the distinction between psychopathology and personality. He has lectured and trained psychiatrists and psychotherapists in evolutionary psychiatry.
This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
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Social media is bad for mental health right? Well... it's more complicated than that. In this episode, we discuss the ways in which novel digital technologies can also improve mental health, and how an evolutionary perspective on tech helps illuminate its dual effects of harming and healing.Tanay Katiyar is a PhD student, co-supervised by Amy Orben and Nikhil Chaudhary, at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBU) and the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge. Drawing on frameworks from cognitive science, evolutionary psychiatry and anthropology, he is currently investigating how our contemporary living conditions and digital environments both protect from and leave us vulnerable to mental health problems in novel ways. He studied economics as an undergraduate in India, and then did his masters in cognitive science at the ecole normale superieure in Paris. He is also a host of the Cognitations podcast, which is dedicated to cognitive science and interviews many renowned scholars across the psychological sciences.
This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.
- Visa fler
