07 August 2018
In this paper, the authors focused on the increasingly growing understanding that the notion of categorical (discrete) mental disorders adopted in the DSM-III, DSM-IV and even in DSM-5 is far removed from the biological reality of the brain. Convergent evidence suggests that the categorical model of the DSM is a poor fit to the inherent structure of psychopathology.
Fortunately, a novel paradigm that aims to re-orient mental health research toward the discovery of underlying neurobiological and biobehavioral mechanisms of mental disorders is emerging. It is based on the modern neuroscientific conceptualization of the human brain as a complex nested hierarchy of functionally specialized neuronal assemblies that interact with each other in a spatially (space) and temporally (time) coherent fashion, maintaining a so-called metastable balance.