What would psychiatry look like if we assumed humans weren't evolved? Samir Okasha's "methodological creationism" thought experiment is one of the most clarifying moves I've seen in this debate. Webinar coming up - 25th of June 6pm BST. Link Below:

Today is a very special day for me! It is marked in my calendar as the anniversary of 'The Talbot Thought'. And this year is the ten year celebration! Ten years today, 3rd of June 2016, I was working as a night porter in The Talbot Inn, Ripley. It was an absolutely dream job. I was paid a decent bit above minimum wage to work alone in an old hotel from 11pm until 7am, four nights a week. I was paid to be alone with my thoughts and the internet! It was the ultimate luxury. On 3rd June 2016, I was just over six months in. I had played with many ideas. It was that night that I came across the idea which I would dedicate myself to. Browsing the Wikipedia for 'schizophrenia' on a whim, I recognised the schizophrenia paradox (how does a common, harmful, early onset condition persist so frequently in the population) and it set me off thinking about evolutionary explanations for mental disorders generally. I realized that this was a huge scientific problem of huge social importance. I threw myself into it from that day onwards. And it has now been ten years! The personal progress I have made in those ten years - going from night porter to Norfolk countryside to write a book, to PhD in Zurich, to now, postdoc in Cambridge - has been a privilege at every stage, and incredibly gratifying. And I've come a long way. There's still a long way to go, but year by year, I have been able to make progress in the key problems which I could see faced the implementation of these ideas: first and foremost I saw we needed better methodologies and concepts, so I worked on an improved scientific method for conducting evolutionary psychiatry, and a strongly reasoned argument for how and why neurodiversity evolved. That was the subject of my first book draft (never published - and never to be published in that form - but eventually turned into both my PhD and eventual book), taking from 2016-2019. When finishing that first book I had no idea I would turn it into a PhD - but in the end that was the obvious option. It was also when finishing the book that I faced the reality and realized that a good idea - even in book form - is not enough to change the world. It needs a lot of work to put into action - words need to not just be written, but heard, and listened to - cared about, made convincing, and improve people's lives. This was 2019, and was when I started getting involved in the evolutionary psychiatry community - which hadn't existed three years previously when I had first had my epiphany in The Talbot Inn and had searched online for anything related to the subject. I would find out later that in fact 2016, the year of my own spark of interest in this field, had also been the year that EPSIG at the Royal College of Psychiatrists was established. Serendipity! What I have been able to get done since joining Zurich is more part of the official record and my CV, so I won't dwell on it; but I will perhaps make note of my motivation and rationalisation. After getting the improved method, concepts and theory out in solid form - which I saw as necessary foundations to be able to confidently approach the world - the question then became 'how do you actually change things for the better'. This is a hard problem, requiring more of an understanding of social dynamics, politics, academia, and lots of different incentive structures. There have been several missing pieces from the field, which I have now sought to fill. Firstly, public materials. There simply hasn't been enough accessible high quality content out there about evolutionary psychiatry. When I got interested in the field, I found basically nothing (a couple of old books and scattered academic articles were the exception). That backlog of content needed to be available for anyone to be able to deep dive if they wanted. I'm still working on this with the podcast, and with my colleagues via the EPSIGUK YouTube channel, which I was happy to revitalize and help create content for (...)