Mental
S
Disorder or
Survival
Mechanism?
What we today label as
problem behaviors can be
seen as ancient traits that
have helped kids adapt
for generations
Photo © Suzanne Tucker/Shutterstock
By Enrico Gnaulati
hortly after my son’s twelve-year-old birthday, we
hopped in the car together and took a jaunt to the
Spider Pavilion on the south lawn of the Los Angeles
Museum of Natural History. I had a hidden agenda for
going. Since an early age, Marcello was prone to become emotionally undone at the sight of spiders. It was
seriously interfering with him completing the chore my
wife and I had added on his twelfth birthday: taking out
the trash. He complained bitterly that there were spiders in the garage where the trash cans were kept and
that this was an unfair chore. I, miffed, assumed this to
be a ploy to get out of performing a family duty. No son
of mine was going to shirk his chores! The test, and
possible cure, would happen at the Spider Pavilion.
Marcello stood back from, but still ogled, the Brazilian
tarantula housed in a brick-size, thick-glass container.
However, when we parted the plastic curtain flaps to
enter the garden where spiders were dangling freely
from myriad leggy plants and wooden rafters, Marcello
became petrified and scurried to the exit. To ask him to
shake it off and return would have been the equivalent
of asking a person in the throngs of a seizure to put
their tongue back in their mouth.
Why are so many kids deathly afraid of spiders,
snakes, the dark, open spaces, enclosed spaces, and
during infancy, strangers, and sudden departures by
parents? Should they not be more afraid of guns, cars,
saturated fats, and cigarettes – real potential modern
sources of mortal harm? Evolutionary psychologists
would say these fears are more innate and carried huge
adaptive value in ancestral environments. Dr. Robin
Fox, best known for founding the anthropology department at Rutgers University, has written widely on how
our biosocial make-up as humans is designed to respond best to hunter-gatherer conditions that existed
for over ninety-five percent of human history. Not our
contemporary automobile filled, crowded, noisy, artificially-lit, city life. In fact, many human characteristics
that are currently classified as psychiatric disorders
have helped us survive and cope as a species.
Take ADHD. Thom Hartmann, the US radio host,
caused a mild stir some years ago with his hunter vs.
farmer theory of ADHD. In a nutshell, he proposed that
ADHD traits such as distractibility, impulsivity, and aggressiveness bolstered the survival of pre-agricultural
humans. Hunters “think visually,” he explained, “and if
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outdoor, green spaces and places.3
We should not be shocked when on the grassy knolls
our ADHD-hunter type kid’s pretend play gravitates toward chasing and being chased, as well as succeeding
at and eluding capture.
Anxiety also is a human trait that has offered and
still offers people an adaptive edge. We may be endowed by Nature to be irrationally anxious, to see danger where it does not exist, until the evidence is to the
contrary, rather than the reverse. It is easy to forget
how down through history catastrophic loss due to disease, war, famine, and predatory and climatic events
was a way of life. As recently as the Middle Ages,
one in five women died in
childbirth.4 Perinatal infant
death rates were about the
same.5 The bubonic plague
in the fourteenth century
wiped out an estimated
seventy-five million people, give or take.6 The influenza epidemic of 19181919 killed off more than
the Great War—an estimated twenty to forty million.7 The average life expectancy until the early
twentieth century hovered
around age forty.8 In classical Greece and Rome, you
were lucky to live until you
were thirty.9 Worrying
about and anticipating the
worst made it less painful
when it was more highly likely to happen. Now, our
brains are designed with this protective anticipate-danger response, even though, in actuality, the
probability of catastrophic loss is far less.
For kids, psychological health and well-being does
not entail an anxiety-free state of mind. In ancient environments, an unanxious kid was at risk for serious danger. Better to automatically interpret that a twig blown
by the wind was possibly a poisonous spider and flee,
than to idly stand around during one unfortunate moment and be mortally bitten. Being psycho-physiologically prepared for danger is always preferable to being
unprepared. This anxious energy exists in all kids, in
some more than others. When we view anxiety as written into the human genome in this way, it should make
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you see a flash in the darkness, or an object move from
the corner of your eye, it is likely potential food or a predator.” 1 Restlessness, constant visual scanning, and being
amped up for quick and aggressive action happen to be
attributes of fine hunters. If Ritalin had been around
150,000 years ago and taken in mass quantities, our survival as a species might have been in question. Traits such
as patience and a flare for organizing and planning are
more becoming of farmers. ADHD children, Hartmann resolved, had ancestors with these hunter-enhancing traits
in abundance. By implication, ADHD children do not have
a mental disorder but are accidently endowed by Nature
with traits of their ancestors
that make them good hunters, but not particularly adept at sitting for long
periods of time in a chalkand-talk classroom.
The notion that ADHD
produces better hunters is
backed up by genetic science. A few years ago, Dan
Eisenberg, an anthropology graduate student from
Northwestern University,
curried favor with various
nomadic and recently settled Ariaal tribesmen in
Kenya and drew their
blood. He discovered that
the tribesmen with the
DRD4 gene, associated
with ADHD, were more
physically nourished in the
nomadic population, but
less so in the settled one.2 It turns out being ADHD in
actuality gives you a leg up under nomadic conditions
when you have to forage and hunt but act as a hindrance when you have to slow down and plow the soil.
ADHD traits might make kids effective hunters, but
the modern classroom is surely no African Savannah.
What is the solution? At the very least, it seems to me,
during periods of the day all young children, and those
manifesting ADHD traits in particular, need to have access to open green spaces and be given permission to
run wild. This is no romantic proposition. Dedicated
professors at the Human-Environment Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois have shown how
ADHD children can undergo enhancements in attention
and concentration after being able to romp around in
and say, “I think my way of parenting has harmed my
us more tolerant of and patient with kids who worry
kid.”
about what lurks in the dark, what physical harm might
(but probably not) be due to weird bodily sensations,
Enrico Gnaulati is a psychologist in Pasadena, Califorhow being away from the protective presence of loved
nia. In his book, “Emotion-Regulating Play Therapy
ones during times of perceived danger can be highly upwith ADHD Children: Staying with Playing,” he is critical
setting, and how actual and imagined creepy-crawly
of medical approaches to the
things send them into a frenzy.
sort of behavior that gets laRather than talk about
beled ADHD in children. Inmental disorders in kids, as if
“Rather than talk about
stead, he views ADHD
they embody some disease enmental disorders in kids, as
phenomenon as rooted in chiltity, we always need to condren’s difficulties containing
sider how kids are put in a
if
they
embody
some
and expressing intense emostate of dis-ease by environtion, and he offers a model of
mental conditions they endisease entity, we always
active play therapy to healthcounter. Educational practices
fully intervene. In his forthand family lifestyles that stress
need to consider how kids
coming book, “Back to
kids by putting them well outare
put
in
a
state
of
Normal: Common-Sense Exside their cognitive masplanations for Kids’ ADHD,
tery-zones and emotional
dis-ease
by
environmental
Bi-polar, and Autistic-Like Becomfort-zones can make normal human traits and behavconditions they encounter.” havior,” he strives to lay out
the normal human meanings,
iors appear problematic.
motives, and developmental
Sometimes, even small
glitches
behind
kids’
troubled
and troubling behavior.
changes in a kid’s environment can have a big pay off.
This essay is drawn from his new book. Visit Enrico at
We tend to lose sight of how environmentally sensitive
his website, dr.gnaulati.net.
- LL kids are, especially younger ones. On any number of occasions in my practice over the years, I have witnessed
how an anxious or ADHD-like kid can be transformed by
seemingly ordinary changes to his or her life situation—parents declaring a renewed commitment to be
References
more predictable in their availability, a change of
1. Thom Hartmann, “Hunters in Our Schools and Offices: The
Origin of ADHD,” Jan. 1, 1994, www.thomhartmann.com/artiteacher, a different school placement, signing up for a
cles/1994/01/hunters-our-schools-and-offices-origin-adhd
sport, a reduced homework load, a summer abroad, a
2. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080609195604.htm
front-of-the-class seating arrangement, a month living
3. Andrea Faber Taylor, Frances Kuo and William C. Sullivan,
away from home with an even-tempered aunt, or any
“Coping with ADD: The Surprising Connection tp Green Play
of a host of other everyday steps.
Settings,” Environment and Behavior 33 (2001): 54-77
An evolutionary perspective on children’s “problem
4. Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing up in Medieval London: The
behavior,” funnily enough, should ease the guilty conExperience of Childhood in History (New York: Oxford University
science of any parent who believes they’re all to blame
Press, 1995), 56
for their kid’s difficulties. There are always ancient
5. Ibid
causes for a kid’s ADHD or anxiety built into the human
6. See Suzanne A. Alchon, A Pest in the Land: New World Epigenome. We have our ancestors to blame, or rather to
demics in a Global Perspective (Albuquerque, NM: University of
New Mexico Press, 2003), 21
credit! Calling ADHD behaviors and anxious traits a
7. See Niall P.A.S. Johnson and Juergen Mueller, “Updating the
form of a disease is extremely disrespectful to our anAccounts: Global Mortality of the 1918-1920 ‘Spanish’ Influenza
cient ancestors who got better and better over the milPandemic,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76 (2002):
lennia honing their ADHD behaviors to take down big
105-115
game, and anxiously anticipate danger, so those that
8. Oded Galor and Omer Moav, “Natural Selection and the Evocame after them had more of a shot at survival. Having
lution
of
Life
Expectancy,”
Nov.
17,
2005,
http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/seminarpapers/dg09102006.pdf
this profoundly historical perspective makes me sit
9. www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/393100/mortality
back and smile when parents come to me in my office
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