Evolving Psychiatry

Everyone's heard of evolutionary theory, but very few have heard of it being applied to mental health and disorder. Why? In this episode, Adam covers the scientific and structural reasons for this state of affairs.Adam Hunt, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Evolution, Mental Health and Behaviour lab at the University of Cambridge. He is also Founding Chair of the Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health, an Executive Committee Member of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Communications Chair for the International Society of Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, and host of the 'Evolving Psychiatry' podcast.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.

Are mental disorders such as ADHD 'real'? Should we be using medication? Sami Timimi comes from a 'critical psychiatry' perspective which questions these fundamental assumptions in psychiatry.Dr Sami Timimi is a retired consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and author. A Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, he has been one of the UK’s most prominent voices in critical psychiatry, writing extensively on childhood, psychotherapy, psychiatric diagnosis, medicalisation, behavioural problems, and cross-cultural mental health. His books include Searching for Normal, Insane Medicine, Naughty Boys, and The Myth of Autism. His work challenges narrowly biomedical models of distress and argues for more contextual, relational, and culturally informed approaches to mental health care.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.

Working out the evolved structure of the mind will have implications across therapy and society. Which directions are most promising? Daniel J. Glass, PhD, is a board-certified clinical psychologist whose clinical work focuses on anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias, and evidence-based psychotherapies, including cognitive behavioural therapy, exposure-based approaches, and acceptance-based interventions. His academic interests centre on the application of evolutionary theory to clinical psychology, including how evolutionary perspectives may inform the understanding, classification, and treatment of mental disorders.Niruban Balachandran is co-leader of PsychTable, an open-science project dedicated to classifying and evaluating evidence for evolved psychological adaptations. His work focuses on organising claims about the evolved mind in a rigorous and transparent way, with relevance for psychology, public understanding, policy, and the broader behavioural sciences.Together, Daniel Glass and Niruban Balachandran bring complementary perspectives on the relationship between evolutionary theory and psychotherapy: one grounded in clinical practice, and the other in the systematic classification and evaluation of evolutionary psychological evidence.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.

What paths to becoming an evolutionary psychiatrist exist? How could anyone train in this field? In this episode, Liam Callico interviews Adam Hunt on his history and the pathways into and forward for the field.Adam Hunt, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Evolution, Mental Health and Behaviour lab at the University of Cambridge. He is also Founding Chair of the Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health, an Executive Committee Member of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Communications Chair for the International Society of Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, and host of the 'Evolving Psychiatry' podcast.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.

Sport, and particularly football, captures billions of people's support. Why are our psychologies so captivated by these games? And could they even be used for improving mental health?The guests today are co-authors on the paper "The people’s game: evolutionary perspectives on the behavioural neuroscience of football fandom".Henry O’Connell is a returning guest: he is a consultant psychiatrist and Clinical Director at HSE Portlaoise, Clinical Professor at the University of Limerick, founding chair of the College of Psychiatrists of Ireland's Evolutionary Psychiatry SIG, and now Co-Chair of the WPA Section on Evolutionary Psychiatry. He is also author of Evolution and Psychiatry: Clinical Cases. Matt Butler is the lead author of the key paper of today's episode. He's a Wellcome Doctoral Clinical Research Fellow at King's College London and a specialist registrar in psychiatry at South London & Maudsley hospitals. His PhD is on psilocybin in functional neurological disorder.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.

Cathedrals and bridges could be built before physics was developed, but the limits of engineering eventually hit a wall. This episode considers how the science of physics eventually informed engineering, and the comparison to how evolution could inform psychiatry.Adam Hunt, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Evolution, Mental Health and Behaviour lab at the University of Cambridge. He is also Founding Chair of the Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health, an Executive Committee Member of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Communications Chair for the International Society of Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, and host of the 'Evolving Psychiatry' podcast.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.

How do clinical psychologists think differently once taking an evolutionary view? How can the evolutionary sciences help in understanding the problems people seek help from therapists for?Simone Cheli, PsyD, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist based in Florence, Italy. He is the founding president of Tages Onlus, a Florence-based clinical, research, and training centre he established in 2014, and an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at St. John's University, Rome. He previously spent fifteen years at the University of Florence working in psycho-oncology and severe mental illness.He is best known for developing Evolutionary Systems Therapy (ESTS), an integrative clinical model that brings together Paul Gilbert's Compassion-Focused Therapy, the metacognitive tradition of Paul Lysaker and Giancarlo Dimaggio, attachment theory, and evolutionary psychopathology. His research focuses on schizotypy, personality disorders, perfectionism, and the dimensional understanding of psychopathology, and he is a member of the HiTOP Consortium.He is the co-editor, with Paul Lysaker, of A Dimensional Approach to Schizotypy: Conceptualization and Treatment (Springer, 2023), and the author of the popular Italian book L'animale che si credeva altro: Guida facile alla psicologia evoluzionistica in sette storie (Fioriti, 2026). He has published over one hundred peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, and serves as co-editor of Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session and associate editor of New Ideas in Psychology and Mental Health Science.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.

Mental disorder diagnosis has increased rapidly in recent decades, and now with the introduction of AI, possibilities for treatment are changing. Where will AI assistants fit into psychiatry and clinical psychology? Allen Frances, born 1942 in New York City, is Professor and Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine. He trained at Columbia (BA), SUNY Downstate (MD), the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training. He chaired Duke's Department of Psychiatry from 1991 and previously spent two decades at Cornell, where he ran the outpatient department and founded a brief therapy program.He is best known for chairing the DSM-IV Task Force (DSM-IV, 1994; text revision, 2000) and, before that, for writing the personality disorders section of DSM-III under Robert Spitzer. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Personality Disorders and the Journal of Psychiatric Practice.His key publications include Saving Normal (2013), the international bestseller and his manifesto against diagnostic inflation; Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis (2013); and Twilight of American Sanity (2017). His August 2025 British Journal of Psychiatry editorial, "Warning: AI chatbots will soon dominate psychotherapy," is his most cited recent work, and he writes a weekly Psychiatric Times series on AI in mental health.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.

Neuroscience is the flagship science of psychiatry, but hasn't led to the advances expected from it. In this episode, Adam discusses difficulties with neuroscience and possibilities for switching to a paradigm that can actually make progress.Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge. Since 2019 he has served on the executive committee of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He also sits on the board of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health. He is the founding chair of the Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health. His PhD thesis entitled ‘Evolving Evolutionary Psychiatry and Explaining Neurodiversity’ received Summa Cumme Laude from the University of Zurich in spring 2024.He has published multiple academic articles in journals such as Biological Reviews, Autism Research and Evolutionary Human Sciences on a range of topics, including how evolutionary psychiatry supports the concept of neurodiversity and how evolutionary theory explains individual differences in cognition and dissolves the distinction between psychopathology and personality. He has lectured and trained psychiatrists and psychotherapists in evolutionary psychiatry.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.

Evolutionary theories are indeed... theories. But are they 'just' theories, in the derogatory sense? Or are they something more... In this episode Adam discusses this question.Dr Adam Hunt is a researcher in the emerging field of evolutionary psychiatry at the Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge. Since 2019 he has served on the executive committee of the Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He also sits on the board of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health. He is the founding chair of the Foundation for Evolution and Mental Health. His PhD thesis entitled ‘Evolving Evolutionary Psychiatry and Explaining Neurodiversity’ received Summa Cumme Laude from the University of Zurich in spring 2024.He has published multiple academic articles in journals such as Biological Reviews, Autism Research and Evolutionary Human Sciences on a range of topics, including how evolutionary psychiatry supports the concept of neurodiversity and how evolutionary theory explains individual differences in cognition and dissolves the distinction between psychopathology and personality. He has lectured and trained psychiatrists and psychotherapists in evolutionary psychiatry.This podcast is financially supported by the Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich.