PALEO/PSYCHIATRY
It was a cold fact that smacked me in the face (or, rather, in my pre-fontal cortex) when I learned that schizophrenia affects 0.3% of persons in the entire world, AND that this statistic probably holds true for the entire history of homo sapiens, 300,000 years’ worth. Why, I wondered, would such a terrible disease persist and recure, presumably by advancing and maintaining its genetic basis generation after generation. What positive effect could be transmitted at that regular rate that would allow schizophrenia to persist among the entire human population down through its ages?
They key features of that malady, its signature symptoms, are delusions and hallucinations. While some societies might identify a person exhibiting those perceptual oddities as spiritually enhanced or demonized, the identified individual experiences usual distortions of perception, often with radically novel ideation. Is radical novelty not a feature of human’s propensity for progressive enhancement, for cognitive and even technological advancement. Indeed, is the genetically encoded price for full-blown schizophrenia perhaps the cost for infusing a partial gene complex into the general population that endows humans with the gift of novel thinking, of new ideation, of actual creativity. Evolution provides opportunities for variations of conditions by partial transmission. Some of us are creative geniuses, and some of us are mad, and most of us are just mediocre. Isn’t the adage sometimes true: that genius and madness are only thinly separated. So the cost to our species, which has risen to rule the animal kingdom, is both just a touch and sometimes a cruel visit of the signature mental marks of schizophrenia: stark creativity.
Almost the same prevalence statistic (3%) applies to another common mental affliction: ADHD — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. That condition, so embedded in the global human population, surely has existed for possibly thousands of years. Though not as devastating, as socially disabling as schizophrenia, ADHD often impacts activities what require sustained attention: scholastic achievement, book reading, document writing, analytic tasks. Yet it can sometimes promote spontaneity and rapid detection. Before the shift from nomadic life some ten to fifteen thousand years ago, humans had to focus on hunting and foraging, which ADHD may have permitted a more enhanced detection of prey as well as predators as well as a rapid sighting of forage. Such qualities today, even with persons “suffering” from ADHD, may account for the quick alterations in the performance of activities that demand rapid change in attention: sports, warfare, firefighting, game playing, investment transactions, crisis management, etc.
Almost at the other end of this dis-attention spectrum is a kind of hyper-attention, a quality often encountered in persons now recognized as being on the autism spectrum, a condition that is now more widely recognized and currently is found to occur in about 0.8% of the world population. While autism can include debilitating or very challenging alterations in brain functions that may affect social communication, use of language and cognition, many individuals with autism are capable of extraordinary intellectual achievement, often based on highly enhanced attention to detail, sustained deep focus, and exceptional memory.
Finally, well documented even in ancient texts if the mental condition of melancholia, nowadays recognized as depression and, among psychiatrists, assumed under the bipolar disorder, which includes varying patterns fluctuating between depression and mania. Depression has often been described as a state of deep reflection, touched by the human capacity to anticipate death, to worry about declining fortune, to experience a sense of self compared to others, to achieve and evaluate one’s personal history. In one sense, all of philosophy addresses the undercurrent of depression in human life. While mania, usually brief episodes that propel an elevation of mood, create an urgency to change, activate a search for new possibilities, proliferate alternative behaviors. All this reflection and activation is humanity’s inheritance. And it is portrayed not only in philosophical investigations, but in myth creation and transmission, in song and poetry, in literature and theater, in dance, in religion, in the universal thirst for ways to understand and honor life.
