Â鶹´«Ã½

From Joe Lewis, Falmouth, Cornwall, UK

I have bipolar disorder. In the modern world, that is often very unhelpful, particularly during hypomanic episodes.

However, in a hunter-gatherer society, I could see these episodes having an advantage. You could stay up all night to watch out for danger. Even the hallucinations that come with psychosis may have been seen as important to a community that believed in communicating with the spirits.

I would say the biggest downside of mental health conditions is living in a society that stigmatises you. If the society embraces your difference, then you can still be a valuable part of the community, and there is no need for evolution to remove those genes from the gene pool.