Network theory offers a fundamental shift in how we understand mental disorders: rather than viewing them as discrete conditions with invisible underlying causes, it conceptualizes them as ever-changing networks of interacting symptoms, emotions, behaviors and traits ¹1Reeves, J. W., & Fisher, A. J. (2020). An examination of idiographic networks of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22491 ↖. It is both a departure from and an extension to the ‘common cause’ model (also known as the latent disease model). In the common cause model, which underlies classification systems like DSM-5 and ICD-10, symptoms are viewed as mere consequences of an underlying disorder — like depression or anxiety — without causal relationships between symptoms. This has shaped psychiatry and psychology ever since the conception of the DSM-III in 1980 ²2Borgogna, N. C., Owen, T., & Aita, S. L. (2024). The absurdity of the latent disease model in mental health: 10,130,814 ways to have a DSM-5-TR psychological disorder. Journal of Mental Health, 33(4), 451–459. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638237.2023.2278107 ↖. Network theory, in contrast, proposes that mental disorders are macroscopic states that emerge from a complex web of causal interactions between symptoms, situated in a person, situated in the world. Symptoms aren’t mere consequences of the disorder, they constitute it ³3Roefs, A., Fried, E. I., Kindt, M., Martijn, C., Elzinga, B., Evers, A. W. M., Wiers, R. W., Borsboom, D., & Jansen, A. (2022). A new science of mental disorders: Using personalised, transdiagnostic, dynamical systems to understand, model, diagnose and treat psychopathology. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 153, 104096. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2022.104096 ↖.

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