How this can be overcome by redefining groups around mechanisms
of disease
Motivated by the National Institute of Mental Health Research Domain
Criteria (RDoC) initiative, a recent approach to this problem considers
mental health transdiagnostically. The aim is to better capture the
complexities of individuals’ mental health conditions and explain the
prevalence of deficits across multiple disorders [3]. Computational
methods have been utilised to better characterise variation in
psychopathology and to define new sub-groups of mental illness [3].
These groups should be built around the presence of physiological or
cognitive biomarkers and have roots in the neuro-biological mechanisms
of mental illnesses (Fig 1A).
Factor analysis is one method of discovering new dimensions of
psychopathology. To this end, large online population studies have
illustrated novel and robust dimensions of psychiatric disease derived
from a consistent set of self-report questionnaires which, independent
of traditional scoring systems, are also associated with specific
deficits on cognitive tasks (Fig. 1B) [3].