Evolutionary scientists have spent over a century developing the theory that explains biological form.
Researchers are only now beginning to apply that theory to the problems of the mind.
The Foundation exists to support that research, to educate clinicians, scientists and the public, and ultimately to change the paradigm of mental health understanding and care.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Evolutionary Psychiatry Special Interest Group has grown to nearly 4,000 members. Landmark publications have appeared in World Psychiatry, the British Journal of Psychiatry, and Kaplan & Sadock’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry.
practising mental health clinicians across the UK and Ireland took part in a multi-site, cluster-randomised trial led by two FEMH trustees, Adam Hunt and Tom Carpenter, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2026.
Clinicians who received the evolutionary framing rated it as five times more useful for patients than the genetic content currently taught.
And three times more useful for clinicians. The genetics education that is currently much more widely taught actively worsened several measures, including stigma.
These effect sizes matched or exceeded established anti-stigma interventions, which is exceptional for a single 30 minute education session. Evolution-informed therapies — Compassion Focused Therapy, Cognitive Evolutionary Therapy, mismatch-reduction approaches — have produced encouraging early evidence, and our trustees and advisory board are running psychoeducation pilots with perinatal psychiatry patients and clinicians and targeted training for psychiatry trainees.
Education efforts are proving effective and are being well received. Promising young researchers are ready to launch RCTs and PhD projects right now, and are looking for relatively modest funding to do so. The pilot work and conceptual foundations exist. They now need to be translated and scaled.
For a full analysis of the potential, read our inaugural report, Before Evolution: The State of Mental Health.
“Psychiatry trainees respond really well to evolutionary ideas. I think it’s because they fill a gap in our thinking about patients and their presentations, and the perspective helps us take a wider view. There’s a lot of enthusiasm among trainees for the potential of evolutionary ideas to help patients as well as clinicians.”Dr Tom CarpenterFEMH trustee, lead organiser of the EPSIG Trainee Engagement Programme and co-first author of Hunt et al. (2026)
