Most patients with mental illness do not have relatives with the same condition. Phylogenetically, it may well have been true that social groups were stabilised by depressed members, and that families were stabilised by biddable members who passively accepted distortion: ontogenetically, these possibilities need to be tested, with the mental health of group members and family members brought into question.

Autism, schizophrenia, mood disorders, and paranoid disorders occur at different stages in ontogeny, and reflect the different evolutionary fears of those stages: autism reflects fear of predation, schizophrenia reflects fear of abandonment, mood disorders reflect fear of independence and paranoid disorders reflect fear of loss of territory.

Connection of instincts with locations in the outside world by hippocampal place cells has become more intricate in humans compared with rodents because of the expansion of the neocortex relative to the hippocampi, parts of which have been eroded by the corpus callosum; human infants and children need help from their parents and carers, who in turn require skills with intimation and vocalisation.
Autistic folk give up on their parents and carers, and make their own connections, constructing a map of a world within which they feel safe.
A patient with schizophrenia has a detailed map of the outside world, but is unable to find himself or herself in it.
For adult humans, the therapist can strengthen the connection between the patient’s instincts and the outside world with the salutation: “Having reflected on our last discussion…”, and the valediction: “I shall give that more thought.”, which make the therapist into somewhere for the patient to be.

The crucial ontogenetic event is the conjunction of subject activations and object inhibitions, whereby the activations of the subject are characterised to the subject by the object without subjectivity, because the object is inhibiting the object: a smile is met with an immediate smile. Multiple such conjunctions are necessary for the subject’s instincts to become connected with the outside world, the exact number being a function of offsets such as a smile that is not met with a smile, a smile that is met with a delayed smile, a smile that is met with a smile and vocalisations of the object’s instincts, a smile that is met with a smile and verbalisation of the object’s instincts, or a smile by the object that is not preceded by a smile from the subject.
The less conjunctive moments, then the less genes that are activated to make proteins which facilitate the conjunctions, so the less plasticity, the more canalization, and the greater susceptibility to epigenetic silencing by deleterious genes.

Homeostasis is the adjustment of the internal environment in response to changes in the outside world: as an index of evolutionary fitness in the present, homeostasis could be a clinically workable ontogenetic starting point for Evolutionary Psychiatry as a discipline.

Defined as the capacity to review independently one’s mental state as it is perceived by others, mental health can be construed as a particular example of homeostasis, in that the perception by others is a change in the outside world, and the review is made with the option of varying one’s responses, thereby to achieve one’s preferred equilibrium in respect of others: one may choose not to exercise the option because of doubts about the mental health of others.

Humans persist with maladaptive behaviour because they remember the positive reinforcement when the same behaviour was adaptive.
Memories give trajectories that predict the consequences of one’s actions, but these memories have to be updated by sensory activation.