Describing disorder: The importance and advancement of compositional explanations in psychopathology

Abstract

Understanding the makeup of mental disorders has great value for both research and practice in psychopathology. The richer and more detailed our compositional explanations of mental disorder—that is, comprehensive accounts of client signs and symptoms—the more information we have to inform etiological explanations, classification schemes, clinical assessment, and treatment. However, at present, no explicit compositional explanations of psychopathology have been developed and the existing descriptive accounts that could conceivably fill this role—DSM/ICD syndromes, transdiagnostic and dimensional approaches, symptom network models, historical accounts, case narratives, and the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)—fall short in critical ways. In this article, we discuss what compositional explanations are, their role in scientific inquiry, and their importance for psychopathology research and practice. We then explain why current descriptive accounts of mental disorder fall short of providing such an explanation and demonstrate how effective compositional explanations could be constructed.