Psychopathological Networks

[Page 2742]For many decades, clinicians have observed that patients often struggle with a number of problems that reinforce one another. Such dynamic systems of mutually interacting symptoms are defined as psychopathological networks. Depression provides a good example: Insomnia may trigger fatigue, which in turn can activate concentration difficulties and sad mood that in turn feed back into insomnia—a feedback loop that is hard to escape from. Around 2010, psychologists and psychiatrists started using modern statistical tools to empirically examine these causal connections among symptoms, and there is a growing interest in both the scientific and the clinical community. The majority of research so far has focused on major depression, but there is also some recent work on posttraumatic stress disorder, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, psychosis, bipolar disorder, ...