Today, many clinicians, scientists, and people who experience (or have experienced) mental health problems are moving away from the idea that these problems have a single cause. For instance, the idea that we should think of psychiatric disorders as brain disorders has been criticized from different angles. Instead, there is more focus on the relationship between mental health problems and biological, psychological, sociocultural, and existential factors. These factors do not operate in isolation: they dynamically interact with each other over time. But how can our conceptual models and scientific research do justice to the multifactorial, complex, and dynamic nature of psychopathology?
This research project
One way of doing so is to conceptualize psychological problems as multidimensional networks, i.e., stable sets of interacting factors that span bio-psycho-social domains. In my PhD project, I examine the epistemic possibilities and limits of such a (multidimensional) network approach. Can it provide alternative forms of understanding, explaining, or exploring mental problems for researchers and people with lived experience?