Evolutionary Hypotheses of Mental Disorder and Their Limitations / 생물치료정신의학

Like the body of Hominin, mind is the result of natural selection. Therefore, an evolutionary approach in the biological aspects is essential for an intrinsic understanding of mental disorders. However, the evolutionary medical approach to mental disordershas not been well researched because evolutionary psychiatry is not widely accepted, and the conceptual paradigm has not been unified. Nevertheless, some evolutionary hypotheses about some mental disorders have been proposed, including the following: 1) thesimple disease argument that mental disorder is a mere disease, 2) the genomic lag hypothesis that current genes are incompatible with evolutionary environmental changes, 3) the developmental mismatch hypothesis that brain development cannot reflect entire-information of surrounding environment, 4) the trade-off hypothesis that costs are offset by other adaptive benefits, 5) the by-product hypothesis that mental disorders are inevitable outcome of evolutionary design, 6) the cliff-edge model that the encephalizationin the Hominin caused mental disorders, 7) the inclusive fitness hypothesis that costs of individual are compensated by benefits of kinship, 8) the antagonistic polymorphism hypothesis that differential costs and benefits according to sex or age cause ofpolymorphic psychological traits 9) the heterozygote advantage hypothesis that the heterozygous genotypes have higher relative fitness, so they can persist even though homozygous genotypes cause mental disorders, and 10) a genomic imprinting hypothesis that conflicts between maternal genes and paternal genes cause mental disorders. I will summarize and compare the evolutionary hypotheses of mental disorders and present the lim itations of each hypothesis.

Research Methodologies of Evolutionary Psychiatry / 신경정신의학

Evolutionary psychiatry is a branch of medical science concerning mental disorders, and also a multidisciplinary research field with close relation to psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and ethology. Although evolutionary psychiatry is a promising area for further psychiatric studies, it is still in its infancy. Thus, there are no certain research methods using evolutionary approaches toward mental diseases. It is still at the level of adopting and applying the research methods of the aforementioned adjacent fields. We aim to investigate a variety of research methods proposed to date and then compare them, which will provide a glimpse of the future of evolutionary psychiatry in the upcoming era.

Evolutionary Approaches toward Psychiatry / 신경정신의학

Evolutionary anthropology is the multidisciplinary field of social and natural sciences regarding the physiology and behavior of Homo Sapiens, and the relationship between human and other Hominoids like primates or ancient human species. Evolutionary anthropological approach toward psychiatry is a promising way to resolve the inter-disciplinary conflicts between different fields of study of the human mind. Evolutionary psychiatry is the specialized part of applied biologic anthropology and clinical psychiatry dealing with the biological causes of mental disorders, the impacts of cultural change toward the evolution of the human mind by studying the ancestry of mankind. I attempted to overview the history of evolutionary anthropology or neuroanthropology related to brain and mind, and the possibility of evolutionary psychiatry by showing the progress of academic and social issues regarding the ultimate causes of several mental illnesses.