Mental Disorders as Causal Systems

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.