Because of my long term interest in mental health matters I recently decided to do a FutureLearn course on Psychology and Mental Health and the reading material included a paper by Peter Kinderman entitled A Psychological Model of Mental Disorder. This made me think that I should be looking at my evolutionary model of human intelligence to see whether it might be able to model some mental health problems. The model already predicts some weaknesses in how the human mind works in areas such as confirmation bias - so could it suggest possible causes for mental illness.
The evolutionary model is based on the idea
that at the neuron level our brain works in exactly the same way as any other
mammal but we have developed a tool, which we call language, to bridge over some
of the weaknesses due to the way the animal brain has evolved. Some of these inherent weaknesses
could underlie some mental health problems because the genetically evolved mechanism is being asked to do a lot of extra work.
The following can be considered draft discussion notes looking at some of the areas which my model suggests there issues which could adversely affect mental health.
