Naturalizing psychopathology—towards a quantitative real-world psychiatry (2022) AcademicArticle

Psychiatric disorders continue to be on the rise around the globe. Meanwhile, efforts and investments directed to early diagnosis and appropriate interventions for mental health problems are lagging resulting in ‘substantial loss of human capabilities and avoidable suffering’ [1]. A major component of our inability to address mental health problems resides in the persistent lack of objective measures for evaluating such difficulties in the daily life of individuals, complicating the detection of clinically relevant changes in the patients’ well-being [2]. Similarly, most studies into the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders lack a detailed description of individual functioning despite influential calls for quantitative approaches to psychopathology.