Evolving Psychiatry

Mar 21 2025 45 ep. 39 mins 46
Evolving Psychiatry Podcast artwork

Evolutionary psychiatry offers evolutionary explanations for the range of mental health conditions identified by psychiatry today. The Evolving Psychiatry podcast provides interviews, insights and an introduction to evolutionary psychiatry, with guest appearances from leading academics and psychiatrists.

  Health & Fitness
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Deciding between hypotheses | Adam Hunt | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #45

Mar 21 2025 93 mins  
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.70010A summary blog post can

Hunting for function behind disorder (Part 2) | Adam Hunt | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #44

Mar 21 2025 72 mins  
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

An impossible science? (Part 1) | Adam Hunt | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #43

Mar 21 2025 44 mins  
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 g

Tech and Mental Health | Tanay Katiyar | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #42

Feb 26 2025 85 mins  
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

For the Good of the Group? | Adam Hunt | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #41

Feb 13 2025 38 mins  
Did mental disorders evolve to provide benefits to the community around us? Well, maybe, but these sorts of explanations could be criticised as naive 'group selection'. In this episode Adam goes into the nuance of understanding how evolution actually works in this common area of debate.Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leve

Autism, Evolution, Neurodiversity | Adam Hunt | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #40

Feb 04 2025 87 mins  
Why did the human species evolve autism? What about different forms of autism? How does an evolutionary perspective align with the neurodiversity movement? 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 Ev

Personality and Psychopathology | Marco Del Giudice | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #39

Jan 24 2025 142 mins  
Why do autism and schizophrenia exist? What are 'fast and slow' life history strategies? What are controversies and opportunities facing the field of evolutionary psychiatry? In this episode, we go deep with Marco Del Giudice... Dr. Marco Del Giudice is an Associate Professor in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Trieste, Italy. His interdisciplinary rese

Understanding Support Networks | Alessandra Cassar | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #38

Nov 25 2024 71 mins  
Humans rely on each other. Mothers, in particular, need help raising children. In this episode we discuss Professor Alessandra Cassar's work seeking to understand how maternal depression relates to gaining social support. We also touch on where evolutionary perspectives may be useful in structuring society more widely. Alessandra Cassar is a professor of economics at the Universit

Susceptibility to Substance Addiction | Tom Carpenter | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #37

Nov 17 2024 45 mins  
Why have humans evolved tendencies for substance addiction? In this episode, Adam and Tom discuss the evolutionary explanations for these vulnerabilities. The discussion is based on their paper "Evolutionary perspectives on substance and behavioural addictions: Distinct and shared pathways to understanding, prediction and prevention". Dr Tom Carpenter is a resident doctor in Psych

Evolved Behavioural Addictions | Giuseppe Pierpaolo Merola | Evolving Psychiatry Podcast #36

Nov 12 2024 69 mins  
Social media, video games, gambling... why are some activities so rewarding that we become addicted? In this episode, we discuss the reason humans are susceptible to 'behavioural addictions', referencing our shared paper 'Evolutionary perspectives on substance and behavioural addictions: Distinct and shared pathways to understanding, prediction and prevention'. Dr. Giuseppe Pierpa