Mental Disorders as Causal Systems

By Richard J. McNally, D. Robinaugh, G. Wu, Li Wang, Marie K. Deserno, Denny Borsboom. 2015

440 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Debates about posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often turn on whether it is a timeless, cross-culturally valid natural phenomenon or a socially constructed idiom of distress. Most clinicians seem to favor the first view, differing only in whether they conceptualize PTSD as a discrete category or the upper end of a dimension of stress responsiveness. Yet both categorical and dimensional construals presuppose that PTSD symptoms are fallible indicators reflective of an underlying, latent variable. This presupposition has governed psychopathology research for decades, but it rests on problematic psychometric premises. In this article, we review an alternative, network perspective for conceptualizing mental disorders as causal systems of interacting symptoms, and we illustrate this perspective via analyses of PTSD symptoms reported by survivors of the Wenchuan earthquake in China. Finally, we foreshadow emerging computational methods that may disclose the causal structure of mental disorders.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e151cd57cafd1f5676fcbbde66b232176e94927

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Citations in the corpus

Regularized Gaussian Psychological Networks: Brief Report on the Performance of Extended BIC Model Selection (2016, background): “Such networks are being extensively being applied to psychological datasets (e.g., McNally et al., 2015; Kossakowski et al., 2015; Isvoranu et al., 2016; Fried et al., 2016; van Borkulo et al., 2015).”
Emotion Regulation Difficulties Related to Depression and Anxiety: A Network Approach to Model Relations Among Symptoms, Positive Reappraisal, and Repetitive Negative Thinking (2019, methodology): “Applying the network approach to depression and anxiety, researchers have revealed critical differences in the overall importance or connectivity of its constituting symptoms (Bos et al., 2018; Bryant et al., 2017; McNally et al., 2015).”
Network Analysis of Depression and Anxiety Symptom Relations in a Psychiatric Sample (2016, background): “According to this perspective, ‘symptoms are constitutive of mental disorder, not reflective of it’ (McNally et al. 2015, p. 2): in other words, ‘causal, meaningful relationships between symptoms not only exist and should be acknowledged, but in fact are the very stuff of which mental disorders are…”