A cybernetic perspective on the nature of psychopathology

A cybernetic perspective on the nature of psychopathology: Transcending conceptions of mental illness as statistical deviance and brain disease

Colin G. DeYoung & Robert F. Krueger

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Abstract

Explicitly or implicitly, psychopathology is often defined in terms of statistical deviance, requiring that an affected individual is sufficiently distant from the norm in some dimension of psychological or neural function. In recent decades, the dominant paradigm in psychiatric research has focused primarily on deviance in neural function, treating psychopathology as disease of the brain. We argue that these conceptualizations are misguided. We recently proposed a novel theory of psychopathology, based in cybernetics and drawing additionally from neuroscience, psychometrics, and personality theory (DeYoung & Krueger, 2018a). In this theory, deviations from the norm in psychological and neural functioning serve as important risk factors for psychopathology but are not in themselves necessary or sufficient to identify psychopathology, which requires the presence of cybernetic dysfunction. Psychopathology is defined as persistent failure to move toward one’s goals, due to failure to generate effective new goals, interpretations, or strategies when existing ones prove unsuccessful. We argue that adopting a cybernetic theory to replace conceptualizations of psychopathology as statistical deviance or brain disease would facilitate improvements in measurement, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of psychopathology.

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"We recently proposed a novel theory of mental illness involving cybernetic dysfunction, failure of the person to make progress toward important psychological goals (DeYoung & Krueger, 2018a), which we believe provides a better foundation for scientific theories of psychopathology, as well as clinical practice, than Wakefield’s or any other extant theory."

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"Statistical deviance theories of mental (and physical) illness have been around for some time (e.g., Boorse, 1977; Cohen, 1955; Scadding, 1967). Their most general form, asserting that any attribute becomes pathological when it deviates too far from a population norm, is easy to discredit, as it would render high levels of talent, ability, or other beneficial qualities a disorder (Wakefield, 1992a)."

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"The ubiquity of the statistical deviance approach is evident in a common label for the field itself (indeed, the former name of the journal in which this article appears): “Abnormal Psychology.” Researchers in the field tend to use “abnormal” synonymously with “pathological,” but most literally it just means “away from the norm” or “unusual,” and the literal meaning does in fact reflect the way most research identifies psychopathology."

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"some people with high scores on almost any symptom dimension do not have the suffering or impairment that is expected to accompany mental illness, and without which it is difficult to claim that the person is “ill” (e.g., Clark & Ro, 2014; Linscott & van Os, 2013)."