Traditional mental disorders defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) guide nearly all clinical research on mental illness. These diagnoses are based mostly on the experience and theories of influential clinical researchers, rather than systematic empirical research.
It is now clear that DSM diagnoses do not align with key mechanisms in neuroscience, genetics, biological psychiatry, or clinical psychology research. This misalignment slows efforts to find the causes of mental illness, and effective treatments.
This project is taking a first step towards finding new constructs to guide clinical research, and to improve the way mental illness is classified in research and practice. To do this, we need to collect data on the different ways people experience a wide variety of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours to understand how these experiences tend to cluster together.
Our study assesses every symptom of every diagnosis described in the DSM-5. We are collecting data on 20,000 people’s experiences of these symptoms in the past year. We will then statistically analyse the ways in how these symptoms co-occur to find consistent patterns.
This will help us re-organise the symptoms described in the DSM-5 following the patterns in the data, and to flesh out a new model—the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology—to diagnose and classify mental illness.
If you decide to participate in this study, you will be asked to respond to a detailed online survey that asks about your own personal experiences. After some background questions about your life, there are a series of multiple choice items with a 5-point scale to rate how true (or common) each statement was for you in the past 12 months.
When you complete the survey you can go in the running for up to AUD$250 in pre-paid cash cards as compensation for your time, or donate these funds to a mental health charity. There are four versions of the survey that vary in length: The full version of the survey includes very wide coverage of human experience (710 items in total) and will take about 2 hours to complete. The shorter versions cover a narrower range of experiences and will take about 1 hour (370 items), 30 minutes (200 items), or 15 minutes (100 items)to complete. Your responses will be completely anonymous and confidential.
To participate or learn more, click here or go to https://mquni.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bj7IR4LM4DmAlme
This study has been approved by the MacquarieUniversity Human Research Ethics Committee (Project ID 6715).
Note that this survey includes questions relating to trauma and suicidality, which may be distressing to answer. We include resources for seeking support if you feel distressed throughout the survey, and for connecting with mental health services.
How Better Definitions of Mental Disorders Could Aid Diagnosis and Treatment
The Conversation
Miri Forbes, David Watson, Robert Krueger & Roman Kotov
The article below explains some of the limitations with our current approach to assessing and diagnosing mental illness. You can read more about this here.
This research paper explains why we need to rethink the diagnosis of mental disorders, and explains how the data-driven dimensions are a useful alternative:
Conway, C. C., Krueger, R. F., & HiTOP Consortium Executive Board. (2021). Rethinking the Diagnosis of Mental Disorders: Data-Driven Psychological Dimensions, Not Categories, as a Framework for Mental-Health Research, Treatment, and Training. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 30(2), 151-158. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0963721421990353 (free access to the content available here).
This research paper introduced the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology, which is the framework for the current research study:
Kotov, R., Krueger, R. F., Watson, D., Achenbach, T. M., Althoff, R. R., Bagby, R. M., ... & Zimmerman, M. (2017). The Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP): A dimensional alternative to traditional nosologies. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 126(4), 454. https://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000258 (free access to the content available here).
This research paper started to fill in the gaps of the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology, by taking a symptom-level approach to statistically modelling data-driven dimensions of mental illness:
Forbes, M. K., Sunderland, M., Rapee, R. M., Batterham, P. J., Calear, A. L., Carragher, N., ... & Krueger, R. F. (2021). A detailed hierarchical model of psychopathology: From individual symptoms up to the general factor of psychopathology. Clinical Psychological Science, 9(2), 139-168. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2167702620954799 (free access to the content available here).
