Recently, a group of Dutch psychologists proposed the ‘Network Theory of psychopathology,’ which attempts to knit biology, psychology, and sociology together in a new way.

Network theory holds that no underlying disease causes the symptoms we associate with mental disorders, rather the symptoms themselves cause and reinforce one another. If that’s true, there’s nothing that we can identify as ‘depression’ because there are only, in fact, symptoms. 

So, instead of talking about diseases, we should be talking about the relationships between symptoms.

 

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