https://psyche.co/ideas/mental-disorders...f-symptoms
EXCERPTS: Views on what a mental disorder is have changed radically in the past hundred years. [...] in the 1960s and ’70s ... psychiatry came under attack, even from within its own ranks, with critics challenging the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis and even the very concept of ‘mental illness’.
As the reputation of psychiatry reached its nadir, a group of research-oriented psychiatrists sought to restore the credibility of their profession. These self-described ‘neo-Kraepelinians’ revived the descriptive tradition championed by the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who believed that careful observation of the signs, symptoms and course of mental illness had to provide the basis for reliable diagnosis. This, in turn, could guide speculation about aetiology and treatment development. This perspective informed a pivotal revision of psychiatry’s ‘bible’, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)...
[...] Despite these advances, the limitations of this now-dominant framework for understanding mental illness have become increasingly apparent in recent years. The difficulty scientists have had finding biological markers of the mental disorders listed in the DSM prompted a former head of the US National Institute of Mental Health to wonder whether our diagnostic categories were nothing more than reified labels, not genuine disease entities...
[...] A novel perspective on psychopathology promises to help solve the problems vexing the neo-Kraepelinian paradigm. This is the network perspective, pioneered by the Dutch psychometrician Denny Borsboom and his colleagues. Borsboom was inspired by contemporary theorising about intelligence – specifically, how it might emerge from the interactions of multiple cognitive subsystems. According to the network perspective he and others have developed, a psychiatric disorder, such as major depression, is itself an emergent phenomenon. It arises from a network of interactions among its constituent elements (eg, sleep, mood and energy).
For an example of how this could work, consider someone who has experienced a stressor at work, and now has difficulty falling asleep. Fatigue will likely occur the following day. Fatigue, in turn, can impair attention to tasks at work and increase irritability. Subsequent conflicts with coworkers can lower mood, exacerbate other symptoms and activate additional ones (such as hopelessness). Causal interactions among these symptomatic elements can reinforce one another, establishing the state we call depression. Hence, unlike a bacterial infection or malignant tumour, depression is not the underlying cause of symptoms. Rather, depression designates the system that emerges from these causal interactions.
The network perspective on psychopathology has stimulated an immense amount of research in recent years. [...] To better understand the systems that give rise to mental illness, network analytic researchers break them down into components. Capitalising on major computational and statistical advances, researchers produce graphs that depict psychiatric syndromes as networks comprising circles (nodes) connected by lines (edges)... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: Views on what a mental disorder is have changed radically in the past hundred years. [...] in the 1960s and ’70s ... psychiatry came under attack, even from within its own ranks, with critics challenging the reliability of psychiatric diagnosis and even the very concept of ‘mental illness’.
As the reputation of psychiatry reached its nadir, a group of research-oriented psychiatrists sought to restore the credibility of their profession. These self-described ‘neo-Kraepelinians’ revived the descriptive tradition championed by the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who believed that careful observation of the signs, symptoms and course of mental illness had to provide the basis for reliable diagnosis. This, in turn, could guide speculation about aetiology and treatment development. This perspective informed a pivotal revision of psychiatry’s ‘bible’, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)...
[...] Despite these advances, the limitations of this now-dominant framework for understanding mental illness have become increasingly apparent in recent years. The difficulty scientists have had finding biological markers of the mental disorders listed in the DSM prompted a former head of the US National Institute of Mental Health to wonder whether our diagnostic categories were nothing more than reified labels, not genuine disease entities...
[...] A novel perspective on psychopathology promises to help solve the problems vexing the neo-Kraepelinian paradigm. This is the network perspective, pioneered by the Dutch psychometrician Denny Borsboom and his colleagues. Borsboom was inspired by contemporary theorising about intelligence – specifically, how it might emerge from the interactions of multiple cognitive subsystems. According to the network perspective he and others have developed, a psychiatric disorder, such as major depression, is itself an emergent phenomenon. It arises from a network of interactions among its constituent elements (eg, sleep, mood and energy).
For an example of how this could work, consider someone who has experienced a stressor at work, and now has difficulty falling asleep. Fatigue will likely occur the following day. Fatigue, in turn, can impair attention to tasks at work and increase irritability. Subsequent conflicts with coworkers can lower mood, exacerbate other symptoms and activate additional ones (such as hopelessness). Causal interactions among these symptomatic elements can reinforce one another, establishing the state we call depression. Hence, unlike a bacterial infection or malignant tumour, depression is not the underlying cause of symptoms. Rather, depression designates the system that emerges from these causal interactions.
The network perspective on psychopathology has stimulated an immense amount of research in recent years. [...] To better understand the systems that give rise to mental illness, network analytic researchers break them down into components. Capitalising on major computational and statistical advances, researchers produce graphs that depict psychiatric syndromes as networks comprising circles (nodes) connected by lines (edges)... (MORE - missing details)