First major RCT on evolutionary psychiatry finds mental health clinicians are far more likely to say describing anxiety as an evolved survival response will help patients, compared to genetic ideas taught in training.
Mental health clinicians are over five times more likely to see evolutionary explanations of anxiety as helpful for their patients, rather than the genetic approaches currently taught to trainee doctors and psychiatrists in the UK and US, a new study shows.*
Research led by the University of Cambridge also found that clinicians across the UK and Ireland are three times more likely to rate a human evolution perspective on anxiety as useful for their own practice and understanding, compared to hereditary accounts.
Explaining how anxiety helped our species to survive and thrive – essentially, a naturally evolved defensive response that can get triggered too easily – provides vital context and a more positive outlook than describing anxiety as possibly ‘hardwired’ into a person’s DNA, argue researchers.
They say that anxiety is linked to “ancestral threats”: from running out of food to social rejection from early hunter-gatherer tribes. Aspects of the modern world, such as online socialising and constant exposure to news, can “amplify the worry response and push some individuals into the pathological range.”
