For more than a century, research on psychopathology has focused on categorical diagnoses. Although this work has produced major discoveries, growing evidence points to the superiority of a... Show moreFor more than a century, research on psychopathology has focused on categorical diagnoses. Although this work has produced major discoveries, growing evidence points to the superiority of a dimensional approach to the science of mental illness. Here we outline one such dimensional system—the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP)—that is based on empirical patterns of co-occurrence among psychological symptoms. We highlight key ways in which this framework can advance mental-health research, and we provide some heuristics for using HiTOP to test theories of psychopathology. We then review emerging evidence that supports the value of a hierarchical, dimensional model of mental illness across diverse research areas in psychological science. These new data suggest that the HiTOP system has the potential to accelerate and improve research on mental-health problems as well as efforts to more effectively assess, prevent, and treat mental illness. Show less
A growing body of evidence highlights the role of life stress as a risk factor for the development and relapse of substance use disorders (SUDs), but the relationship of life stress with the... Show moreA growing body of evidence highlights the role of life stress as a risk factor for the development and relapse of substance use disorders (SUDs), but the relationship of life stress with the interactions among SUD symptoms is overlooked. The current study investigated the role of life stress in symptom networks of 3 different SUDs—alcohol, tobacco, and drug use—using the U.S. representative data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC) I and II (N = 34,653). The symptom networks were estimated using the Ising model and l1-regularziation with model selection based on the Extended Bayesian Information Criterion. We examined the association of stress with 2 network characteristics: the network connectivity and the network structure. In addition, we applied bootstrap routines to examine the stability of our results and tested whether our findings of Wave 1 replicated in Wave II of the NESARC. For alcohol and drug use symptoms, but not for tobacco use symptoms, greater network connectivity (which is related to psychiatric severity and prognosis) was associated with the number of stressors. In contrast, the structure of SUD symptom networks remained stable regardless of the level of stress, which indicated that the order of central nodes in the symptom networks was not significantly associated with stress. Altogether, our findings suggest that there is a quantitative (i.e., greater connectivity), but not qualitative (i.e., structure), difference in alcohol and drug use symptom relationships associated with life stress. Show less
