One Grand Factor Aims to Explain All Mental Health Conditions
The psychopathology ‘p-factor’ struggles to clarify messy psychiatric diagnoses
A central problem of modern mental health is that we don’t even know what we’re treating. Speaking as a psychiatrist, I’m aware that we have fancy labels for many, many “diseases” — in fact, 298 of them according to our most recent diagnostic manual. That classification system identifies conditions that are supposedly distinct, separable entities. But we know that many of our patients’ symptoms don’t fit into these tidy boxes, but rather blend, overlap, and change over time.
This isn’t just a problem of how we define specific mental health disorders, but how we comprehend the ways all of these different conditions relate to each other. It reflects our ignorance regarding the origins and nature of psychiatric conditions.
For psychiatry, the uncertainty about how to best categorize and label various conditions undermines the whole field. Our lack of clear, testable, explanations for how mental health conditions arise has led some to question whether psychiatric diseases really exist. Yet few question that some people’s brains cause dysfunction and distress when they repeatedly conflict with the expectations and rules of society.
