H.S. For Sunday 081907

Hey folks,

Happy Sunday to you. This one is just too funny. I had to share this. I figure starting the day with a good laugh is therapeutic, so here you go.

Turns out that according to this Dr. Randolph Nesse, there is a very good reason for you having fear in your life. If you are down, or feeling anxiety, don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault. Going against the common psychobabble popular opinion, he will tell you that these are simply adaptations you have gone through during Evolution. Listen to this “story” and the solution. This is too funny.

According to Live Science -The Evolution of Anxiety

I’m standing frozen in terror at the entrance of an amusement park, holding the hand of an excited child, and thinking, “No. No, No. I can’t go in here.”

My kid unhooks her hand, wipes the sweat on her skirt, and says sweetly, “It will be OK, Mommy. You can pick the first ride because you’re so scared,”

Alert as a rabbit in a hunter’s field, I scan a few rides and choose one designed to delight a 5-year-old. It’s called Starship America, a ring of tiny rockets built for two. It goes around and around and then each rocket goes up and down.

Piece of cake, I think.

But as we climb aboard one of those rockets-of-death, my anxiety rises up like bubbling magma and takes over my body. My heart races, my breathing grows shallow, and I want to jump out of that steel air-coffin and run run run away.

I am ashamed of my fear until I think about the work of Randolph Nesse, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan.

Nesse is a Darwinian psychiatrist interested in applying evolutionary theory to traditional views of mental illness. Instead of calling mood disorders such as anxiety or depression “illnesses,” he believes there might be good evolutionary reasons for feeling blue or scared; these feelings are not necessarily diseases or disorders, but adaptations.

For example, successful, competent people with seemingly great lives present at Nesse’s clinic feeling depressed, but not knowing why. Nesse asks the usual psychiatric questions, but he also asks broader questions about their lives. Was there a goal not achieved? What’s going on with the path of their lives? Embedded in those questions can be major issues that explain why someone has lost hope, despite the trappings of a “perfect life.”

Who says what is a perfect life? Just curious.

Retreating into depression in the face of perceived failure makes evolutionary sense, Nesse points out, and his job is to help patients find hope again.

It’s not your fault.

Fear in a space ship also has evolutionary roots. Anxiety is an extended version of the fight–or-flight response which evolved to keep us alive; an animal without fear is a dead animal. But humans have a penchant for dragging the fight-or-flight response into every situation and holding onto it until we are sick.

What helps, Nesse claims, is realizing anxiety is not necessarily a bad thing but a good thing, because anxiety attacks often keeps us from certain unpleasant situations.

I know someone who get Anxiety attacks on a semi normal bases. I guess I should just tell my friend that it’s a good thing.

I could imagine Nesse sitting in the next rocket, talking to me above the happy screams of those around me.

“Look,” he might say, “You’re whizzing around in the air in a capsule and humans didn’t evolve to be in this situation. It is indeed scary. You have your child in that rocket and you are appropriately terrified she will fall out. It makes sense, and it will be over soon.”

What a complete bunch of bunk. OK, leaving aside that even Dr. Nesse cannot prove Evolution to begin with. If nothing added to nothing is nothing, nothing taken from nothing is nothing, where did the first something come from? Why would we not be in rocket ships? We can do whatever we put our minds to. We are not mindless and soulless animals. We have gone from horse and carriage, and candle light, since the beginning of mankind, to laser beams and space travel, in about the last 100 years.

This is simply one psychobabblist hyping another. Meredith F. Small is an anthropologist at Cornell University.

So to all of you out there that feel that you are in need of this type of “help,” remember, your anxiety is normal. There is nothing wrong with you. You are fine. You are just feeling the adaptations of Evolution. All is well.

Amazing.
Peter