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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV0577

The Evolutionary Origins of Schizophrenia

EVOLUTIONARY ORIGIN OF SCHIZOPHRENIA

The repurposing of fear centers shaped by evolution in response to ancient threats to respond to modern social stress may explain the catatonic, delusional, and disorganized presentations of schizophrenia.

The aim is to propose the hypothesis that the symptoms of schizophrenia can be explained within an evolutionary framework. No numerical data, sample, or statistical analysis was used; instead, a theoretical discussion was developed through three diagrams. The poster compares the ancient fear response (freezing, agitation, auditory and visual sensitivity, fear and anxiety, and heightened arousal) with the response to modern social stress (inferring hostility or aggression from the environment as the cause, fear and anxiety, and heightened arousal), proposing that both use the same central nervous system circuits. According to the author, the delusional mood and the pathological mood associated with the phenomenon that emerge in schizophrenia are undifferentiated but intense experiences of fear that directly affect the fear center formed by the amygdala. Because these stimuli are nonspecific, the central nervous system responds ambiguously within its range of possible responses: a response resembling an encounter with a predator leads to catatonia, hypersensitivity to sound leads to auditory hallucinations, and the perception of hostility or attack from the environment leads to paranoid ideas—that is, delusions. The poster lists these correspondences as catatonic stupor and catatonic agitation (catatonic type), auditory and visual hallucinations, persecutory delusions and delusions of reference (delusional type), and insomnia. It states that becoming indifferent to higher-order sentiments concerning social justice and economic values is a plausible consequence of repeated encounters with the fear of death, and associates this with the disorganized type. In conclusion, it proposes that the use of fear centers produced by evolutionary selection to respond to modern social stress determines the overall presentation of schizophrenia.

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