The Harmful Dysfunction Analysis: An Evolutionary Approach to Emotional Disorders 

Abstract: This chapter explores the concept of an emotional disorder from the perspective of Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) of mental disorder. According to the HDA, a disorder is the failure of a mechanism to perform its evolved function, in a way that is harmful to the organism. The distinction between disorder and nondisorder is the foundation of medical, including psychiatric, nosology, yet the concept remains much debated. After surveying competing views of mental disorder and arguing for the conceptual advantages of the HDA, this chapter considers some of the challenges that arise in applying the HDA to distinguish disordered versus normal emotional functioning. Reviewing various analyses of the sources of possible diagnostic errors including the cliff-edge and smoke-detector principles, as well as the most prominent evolutionary theory of emotion, the superordinate-program theory of emotion, the authors provide an overview of the unique difficulties emotional disorders pose to diagnostic psychiatry.