Jerome Wakefield is a professor of social work in the Silver School of Social Work at New York University. Much of his work is in the history and philosophy of psychiatry. He is renowned in evolutionary psychiatry for his "harmful dysfunction" analysis of mental illness. We discuss our evolved human nature and how we can designate 'disorder' given our understanding of biological design, the pathologisation of normal sadness as depression, and the worth of evolutionary psychiatry to society. You can follow Adam Hunt on X/Twitter @RealAdamHunt