ABSTRACT
A growing body of evidence suggests that prenatal experiences can shape an individual's body and mind to the world in which it will likely find itself. When one considers mismatches to be a live possibility, one sees that a lot of the language that's endemic to psychiatry, such as disorder, dysfunction, malfunction, broken brains, broken minds, failure of function, and breakdown, are misleading at best, and harmful at worst. The critical analysis of psychiatry developed, in Europe and the United States, into the "antipsychiatry" movement. The "dysfunction" analysis of mental disorder crumbles even more when we take the field of development into account. The idea that certain symptoms of mental disorders, such as delusions, hallucinations, phobias, or violent emotions, may represent mismatches, or falsified predictive adaptive responses, glows with subversive potential. The core idea is that humans are shaped by evolution to exhibit a certain degree of phenotypic plasticity, which is a theme emphasized by human behavioral ecology.
