Evolving Mental Health

MAPPING (Measuring and Assessing Presentation and Prognosis In Non-industrialised Groups') Mental Health is an international working group initiated by Dr Adam Hunt and Prof. Adrian Jaeggi at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich. It brings together evolutionary anthropologists, cross-cultural psychologists, and psychiatrists from institutions across the world for a shared mission: to investigate mental health in the least market-integrated and Westernised societies on Earth. MAPPING targets specifically the small-scale, subsistence-level societies that most closely resemble the conditions of human evolutionary history. These are the populations where the ‘evolutionary mismatch’ hypothesis can be most rigorously tested.

We would embed PhD students with existing field sites where anthropological access is already established. Each researcher would (i) translate and adapt mental-health instruments into local idiom in collaboration with community members, (ii) collect quantitative prevalence data on traits and emotional states related to mental disorder and (iii) document local idioms of distress and treatment strategies. The resulting cross-site dataset could be continued and expanded over time. Data gathered would stand as an invaluable resource in perpetuity.

We are budgeting one PhD per group. Nikhil Chaudhary, Adrian Jaeggi and Amber Thalmayer have already been working in their locations with mental health data, so we are more certain about the possibility of gathering good data from there: each of those three groups could possibly host a second PhD, for a further $200,000. Within two years, we would expect to have good early data on what mental disorders exist.

We are not exactly sure what data we would collect here. The basic motivation is that mental disorders can persist despite evolution if they are trade-offs of other functional attributes. For the families where certain people are severely disabled, there might be subclinical traits in the rest of the family members, which is where the trade-offs exist. For people impacted themselves, their difficulties might be being diagnosed but their strengths or benefits of the traits overlooked. The basic principle is that we could look for these trade-offs. This has been done a little bit already: we know that autism is associated with intelligence and systemizing, for example. There are wide anecdotal accounts from family members and advocates reporting associated strengths. Very little research effort has gone into this, though. It needs rigorous investigation.

This is the area of research where we have maybe the most flexibility, and precise activities would depend on what datasets we can get access to, and exactly who we would be able to employ to work on it full time. The budget below is therefore indicative. We assume we would need large-scale population data gathering, collaborating with psychologists. Ideally we could work with biobanks and major health datasets. A few full-time psychologists with relevant big data and population-wide studies would be employed to run this.

The UK has excellent networks and links with the NHS of people who are willing to try these sorts of projects. Pricing in clinician training and time is the major cost here. The Royal College of Psychiatrists' Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group has grown to nearly 4,000 members. Evolution-informed therapies — Compassion Focused Therapy, Cognitive Evolutionary Therapy, mismatch-reduction approaches — have produced encouraging early evidence, and our trustees and advisory board are running psychoeducation pilots with perinatal psychiatry patients and clinicians and targeted training for psychiatry trainees.

For example, in March 2026 Adam Hunt was invited to give a whole day of training in the York NHS Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) — recorded, including a session on low mood, depression and suicidality. This team have expressed willingness to collaborate on projects trying to impact teen suicidality.

We have published a full prospectus of possible evolution-informed projects which funding could support. Below are the six we would run first — five at the prospectus's costed pilot prices, and the workplace pilot scaled up to several workplaces.