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The network takeover reaches psychopathology
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The controversies embroiling the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; American Psychiatric Association 2013) culminated in the head of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) proclaiming that the DSM would cease to be the essential framework for grant applications submitted to the Institute (Insel 2013). NIMH would now be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories” to fund proposals targeting trans-diagnostic mechanisms as embodied in the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative (Insel et al. 2010). Remarkably, even the chief architect of the new manual had seemingly lost faith in the categorical approach. He and his co-authors announced, “We are now coming to the end of the neo-Kraepelinian era” (Regier et al. 2013, p. 68). As the diagnostic manual was undergoing its periodic overhaul, a team of clinical psychometricians developed a hierarchical dimensional alternative to the DSM's categorical system (Kotov et al. 2017). Capping this structure was the p factor (Caspi et al. 2014), the general factor of psychopathology akin to g , the general factor of intelligence. And just as intelligence researchers have sought to identify the biological referent of g (e.g., Deary 2012), so have some psychopathologists suggested that the p factor “may have a physical reality” (Lahey et al. 2011, p. 187), perhaps genetic. However, it is questionable whether the p factor amounts to an empirical discovery about a major cause of psychopathology. As van Bork and her colleagues have emphasized (Van Bork et al. 2017), any dataset consisting of highly intercorrelated measures is mathematically bound to yield a general factor, even if the factor has no existential referent independent of the data themselves. The categorical and dimensional perspectives have long been the only nosological games in town (McNally 2011, pp. 184–211). Yet, the landscape of our field dramatically changed when Borsboom,...