A provocative but problematic paper just out offers a new perspective on psychiatric symptoms.
The basic idea is that rather than psychiatric disorders being entities, they are just bundles of symptoms which cause each other:
...symptoms are unlikely to be merely passive psychometric indicators of latent conditions; rather, they indicate properties with autonomous causal relevance. That is, when symptoms arise, they can cause other symptoms on their own. For instance, among the symptoms of MDE we find sleep deprivation and concentration problems, while GAD (generalized anxiety disorder) comprises irritability and fatigue. It is feasible that comorbidity between MDE and GAD arises from causal chains of directly related symptoms; e.g., sleep deprivation (MDE) -> fatigue (MDE) -> concentration problems (GAD) -> irritability (GAD).
The authors seem to have mixed up their labels in the middle there, but you see the drift. This symptom-based approach stands in contrast to the idea that ...
