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].