Exclusive Interview With Dr. Steven Lesk
Dr. Steven Lesk has been a practicing, board-certified psychiatrist since 1984, treating thousands of adult patients while researching, writing articles and mentoring students. He served as chairman of psychiatry at a large VA hospital in New York and assistant professor at the affiliated medical school. He is pioneering new theories in hopes of improving our understanding of the illnesses patients endure and reducing stigma while surging empathy. He has published a book, Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness, to explain and outline those efforts. Unlike any other work in the field, Dr. Lesk’s “primitive organization” theory explains the phenomenon of schizophrenia with advanced, scientifically documented clarity and depth, opening a fresh window on mental illness while weaving together disciplines as diverse as Darwinian evolution, anthropology, physics, neurochemistry and Freudian psychology in a lucid panorama.
Tell us about your work and career as a psychiatrist.
I've been a practicing, board certified psychiatrist for over four decades, recently retired. I've treated thousands of adult patients while researching, writing articles and mentoring students. I served as Director of Inpatient Services and as Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Brooklyn VA Hospital, and was assistant professor at the hospital's affiliated medical school. I live east of Minneapolis.
What was the impetus for writing Footprints of Schizophrenia: The Evolutionary Roots of Mental Illness?
I was never satisfied with the explanations we as psychiatrists had to offer our patients. Catch phrases like "chemical imbalance," genetics” or "connectivity" explained nothing. As a dyed in the wool nerd, I said to myself at some point, “who better to get to the bottom of a centuries old conundrum than myself?” After a period of broadening my intellectual horizons and knowledge base I felt like I'd truly found a landscape of difference and a unique point of view in the puzzle of schizophrenia and needed to get it out to the general public and scientific community at large. It answers the most essential questions about schizophrenia and mental illness en masse better than any so called explanation I've read, although, in reality, there are no in depth solutions to this ancient puzzle out there.
How would you describe the book?
It is a research based work, written accessibly for the genera pubic, that details the basis of mental illness as a whole, giving a detailed explanation of a very straightforward panorama.
Briefly tell us about your theory that evolution is intertwined with mental illness.
Hominins, or human like animals, have been around for millions of years, but language only about 50,000, a drop in the bucket evolutionarily. Language jettisoned our minds to a complex, reality oriented framework that is so much more advanced than the average caveman that by 10,000 BC we'd wiped out all the other species of the genus Homo and fanned out across the globe, now dominating mother earth. In leaving this primitive organization of thought and blasting into the modern adult mentality, we defied entropy and suppressed the neurochemical dopamine. Not everyone is on board with this slick metamorphosis and those least accommodating to the new mandate we label mentally ill. My prediction is than in ten or twenty thousand years everyone will be on board and there will be no mental illness as we know it.
There are many theories about the causes and roots of mental illness, how do your ideas differ?
One cannot truly understand an illness without taking into account our evolutionary past and future process. As T. Dobzhansky said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. My theory takes note of our primordial evolutionary habitat and how the thought processes of Mr. Neanderthal differ from our own since the birth of language. It may be mind stretching to imagine a condition that results primarily from the evolutionary moment we happen to be in but if you think about it, the so called “mismatch” diseases like type diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's Tourette's and many others, congeal around the infinite differences between our jungle past and our modern, disco dancing, latte guzzling scene. No other theory takes this broad view into account.
What is the key message you want readers to take away from the book?
What we call mental illness is entirely due to the evolutionary moment we find ourselves in, and a thoroughly documented, in depth explanation for this point of view if provided for your reading pleasure. I've tried to make the work accessible to all.
What are your thought about the stigma regarding mental illness in this country? It seems to be at an all-time high.
Since stigma results from ignorance, and we have very discombobulated, non-explanations for what mental illness really is, people are left to speculate bizarre, off the wall theories about what and who the mentally ill really are. Psychiatry is in some ways in the dark ages, having no blood test, or x-ray with which to fashion a diagnosis, we stumble around piecing together a probable viewpoint. My book, by making crystal clear the origin of these mental maladies, will reduce stigma markedly. Schizophrenia hits one percent of the population worldwide, yet one hears little or nothing about it in the daily press sheets and infotainment programs.
We find ourselves in a very stressful, emotional and stressful election year right now-what impact could this have on our mental health?
To blame the recent uptick in anxiety, depression and suicide, especially among the young, solely on social media is, I believe to be a vast oversimplification. Environmental realities like political gridlock, societal chaos, climate catastrophes, wars and other beams of social injustice all contribute to a swelteringly debacle of instability. My next book, Entropy's Desire, relates such social phenomenon to the second law of thermodynamics and the subtle, lurking influence it has on global disorder, including mental illness, physical infirmity, longevity, wars, etc.
What are you working on now and what can we expect from you next?
Entropy's Desire, like Footprints of Schizophrenia, with its focus on evolutionary forces, highlights a vastly ignored undercurrent on human behavior and frailty, entropy or the second law of thermodynamics. Like the cooling cup of coffee left on the table which reaches room temperature over time, we are all slowly dissipating mugs of java. I explain how entropy lurks behind everything we do and are, with its vast implications for longevity, societal chaos, wars and suicide as it is inserted into all of us as the death instinct. Fortunately, its opposite, antropy, or the life instinct, or as Freud called it, Eros, is also an under recognized behemoth in the motion of protoplasm, and the tragic swirl of a nervous breakdown.
For more information, visit https://stevenleskmd.com/
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