Commentary on Boysen and Isaacs (2022) and Boysen et al. (2022)

We provide a commentary and critique on two recently published articles (Boysen et al., 2022; Boysen & Isaacs, 2022) about sexual exploitation of people who experience mental illness as evolutionarily adaptive. We suggest that the studies in both these articles have conceptual and methodological issues that misrepresent the extent to which actual mental illness is a cue to sexual exploitability. Our concerns include the presentation of mental illness as a unitary construct, that the cues suggested are not representative of actual mental illness, and that the evolutionary arguments about sexually exploiting people with mental illness are weak. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)