Are psychiatric conditions linked to Western, industrialized lifestyles, akin to other “diseases of civilization,” or have they always been part of human variation? Are psychiatric traits necessarily harmful and selected against, or can they be neutral or adaptive in some contexts? Addressing these core questions in evolutionary psychiatry requires examining and quantifying psychiatric symptoms and their subclinical manifestations in radically different cultural and ecological settings, such as small-scale subsistence societies. However, tools developed in the global North are often ill-suited to these communities, failing to translate culturally specific experiences. Here, I present a multi-stage approach for assessing subclinical psychopathological and personality traits among the Tsimane’, an Indigenous forager-horticulturalist population in lowland Bolivia.
