Abstract

The network approach to psychopathology has recently generated enthusiasm in the research community. This is likely due in large part to network methods being promoted with the promise of improving clinical prevention and intervention strategies by explicating the dynamic causal architecture of mental illness. As a result, studies using network methods have proliferated with the aim of understanding causal interactions between psychiatric symptoms through empirical data. The concerns surrounding the equivocal, stationary and ungeneralizable nature of current symptom network results contrast with the rhetoric in much of the network literature promising meaningful clinical insights from these methods. Alternative modeling methods and research designs – for example, collecting experimental data with reliable measurement of symptoms over time – are needed to make causal inferences about relationships between symptoms, and thus to achieve the aims of the network approach to psychopathology. Ultimately, it remains unclear what can be meaningfully concluded from the extant network literature with respect to the onset, maintenance or treatment of psychopathology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)