Advance Praise for Dimensions of Psychological Problems
This book brings together Lahey’s clinical acumen, commitment to evidence-based public health, and methodological sophistication to fashion a new way of thinking about psychological problems. It’s an eye-opener, and a game changer. It’s also a great read!
Avshalom Caspi, PhD
Edward M. Arnett Professor Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke University
Professor Lahey has written a bold and prescient book that points the way to how psychological problems will be understood and classified in the foreseeable future. For too long, these problems have been classified based on tradition, as opposed to evidence. Lahey shows how the classification of psychological problems can be based on data pointing to underlying dimensions of human experience, thereby solving numerous scientific dilemmas, while also reducing stigma. Essential reading for all practitioners, researchers, and policymakers in the field of mental health.
Robert F. Krueger, PhD
Hathaway Distinguished Professor
Distinguished McKnight University Professor Department of Psychology University of Minnesota
Psychological problems touch everyone. If you have ever wondered why psychological problems are diagnosed the way they are, this book is for you. Dr. Lahey explains his radical plan for how it can be done 100% better. This book needs to be heard, and if we listen, everyone’s mental health will improve. The book is authoritative, it’s readerfriendly, and it’s very, very brave.
Terrie E. Moffitt, PhD
Nannerl O. Keohane University Distinguished Professor Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
Duke University
A fascinating read with a bold vision that may fundamentally change how the reader will think about etiology and diagnosis. It will draw you in like a crime novel even though the first chapter gives away one culprit: the current failed psychiatric concepts. Lahey’s erudite but highly accessible book offers many novel insights on the genetic structure, individual dispositions, the environmental contribution to and the hierarchy of psychological problems. There is no other book that marries our insights on the nature with those on the nurture of psychological problems so expertly and brilliantly.
Henning Tiemeier, MD, PhD
Sumner and Esther Feldberg Chair of Maternal and Child Health
Harvard University School of Public Health Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology Erasmus University Medical Center
Ben Lahey puts all his years of experience into this book which is so refreshingly and eloquently written that it will inspire those who seek to expand their understanding of psychological problems. Lahey unties the chains of restricted categorical thinking and reconsiders the nature and causes of psychological problems from a dimensional perspective in a way that will renew our insights.
Frank C. Verhulst, MD, PhD
Research Professor at Erasmus University Medical Center
Dimensions of Psychological Problems
Replacing Diagnostic Categories with a More Science-Based and Less Stigmatizing Alternative
BENJAMIN B. LAHEY
Irving B. Harris Professor of Epidemiology, Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience Department of Public Health Sciences University of Chicago
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lahey, Benjamin B., author.
Title: Dimensions of psychological problems : replacing diagnostic categories with a more science-based and less stigmatizing alternative / Benjamin B. Lahey. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021015167 (print) | LCCN 2021015168 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197607909 (paperback) | ISBN 9780197607923 (epub) | ISBN 9780197607930 (online)
Subjects: MESH: Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. 5th ed. | Mental Disorders—etiology | Adaptation, Psychological | International Classification of Diseases | Social Factors
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015167
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015168
DOI: 10.1093/med/9780197607909.001.0001
This material is not intended to be, and should not be considered, a substitute for medical or other professional advice. Treatment for the conditions described in this material is highly dependent on the individual circumstances. And, while this material is designed to offer accurate information with respect to the subject matter covered and to be current as of the time it was written, research and knowledge about medical and health issues is constantly evolving and dose schedules for medications are being revised continually, with new side effects recognized and accounted for regularly. Readers must therefore always check the product information and clinical procedures with the most up-to-date published product information and data sheets provided by the manufacturers and the most recent codes of conduct and safety regulation. The publisher and the authors make no representations or warranties to readers, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of this material. Without limiting the foregoing, the publisher and the authors make no representations or warranties as to the accuracy or efficacy of the drug dosages mentioned in the material. The authors and the publisher do not accept, and expressly disclaim, any responsibility for any liability, loss, or risk that may be claimed or incurred as a consequence of the use and/or application of any of the contents of this material.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Marquis, Canada
5.
7.
8.
9.
Foreword
Just what is mental disorder—or as it’s often termed in medical literature, mental illness? This seemingly basic question has plagued philosophy, religion, science, and clinical practice for millennia.
In Dimensions of Psychological Problems, Benjamin Lahey expounds upon a radically simple model related to ordinary processes in development. He contends that what we commonly term mental disorders are in fact not actual disease states but instead the extremes of distributions along several underlying and fairly universal dimensions of thought, emotion, and behavior. In other words, rather than comprising categorical “boxes” denoting qualitative, essentialist medical conditions, these problems are actually the product of genetic liabilities and contextual processes that render some individuals—at some points of their life spans—to experience non-normative levels of maladjustment (related to either their well-being or, for externalizing/aggressive problems, injury and impairment for those with whom they interact). In fact, nearly all of us will encounter such extremes of psychological problems during our lifetimes, often in waxing or waning patterns. Forerunners of these issues typically emerge during childhood and adolescence, via the unfolding of transactional patterns of risk and protective factors, featuring within-individual propensities that work in tandem with social and economic forces.
Indeed, the sheer ordinariness of psychological problems (often branded as psychopathology in scientific research) is the underlying message of this book. But ordinary does not begin to describe the importance of the messages or the clarity of the writing. Instead, they are both extraordinary.
Lahey argues that true mental illnesses do not exist, at least as a set of categorical disease entities. Yet he makes haste to differentiate this perspective from half-century-old notions that mental disorders are just myths, a la Thomas Szasz. Lahey is clear that psychological
problems—especially at the extremes of relevant distributions and particularly those with early life onset—can be devastating to individuals, families, communities, and even entire societies, comprising far more than sheer problems in living. As he readily admits, many other clinical scientists are converging on these perspectives (even though Lahey is overly modest in discussing his own extensive scientific output along such lines). He thus joins such efforts as developmental psychopathology; the National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domains Criteria; and the growing number of investigators interested in hierarchical models of psychopathology, including the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology.
Among the key features of Lahey’s formulation, I begin with the core position that psychopathology is decidedly not “all or none.” I remember vividly that as a graduate student many years back, I learned that one either had or did not have autism, or bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, or hyperactivity [the forerunner term for attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)]. Today, massive amounts of research have revealed that nearly every form of psychological dysfunction/ psychopathology lies on a continuum with more normative patterns of behavior. Think of current terms such as autism spectrum disorders or bipolar spectrum conditions: The core subject matter is gradations of behavior, thought, and affect. Determining what is normative versus what is atypical entails major efforts to ascertain accurate cutoff points, just as is the case for medical conditions such as high normal versus pathologically high blood pressure. Yet in the case of behavior and emotion, making such determinations is greatly complicated by knotty problems related to self-reports (or informant reports) of problems, as opposed to objective biological indicators, along with comparisons to social and cultural standards that provide key comparisons for behavioral normality.
In many respects, Lahey’s arguments are parallel to important perspectives from evolutionary psychology, which posits that what are today considered mental disorders or diseases are in fact adaptations. That is, anxiety “disorders” in modern, urban societies may represent perfectly functional alarm functions in relation to potentially threatening stimuli from earlier phases of human evolution—which become dysfunctional only in the context of contemporary, postindustrial,
sedentary contexts. Similar lines of reasoning may well apply to many variants of depressive affect and behavior, which can be viewed as largely expectable responses to loss or defeat. Moreover, in relation to genetic vulnerability, what may be quite deleterious if evidenced in full form could actually be adaptive in a heterozygotic configuration (in relation to two different alleles of a certain gene)—or, at a dimensional level, less “loaded” combinations of risk alleles.
Furthermore, it goes without saying (yet still needs to be emphasized, as Lahey carefully does) that genes always interact and transact with context, epigenetically and beyond—both within individuals and across members of a species. It would be a major mistake to posit that mental disorders are inevitably the product of “bad” or maladaptive genes, if context is ignored. (Admittedly, as I highlight at the end of this Foreword, in some instances, specific genetic abnormalities do underlie serious problems of adjustment, particularly related to neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism or ADHD.) Yet it is an equal mistake to take on the wholly cultural-contextual viewpoint that what we term maladjustment is solely the product of deviance from personal standards or social norms. Doing so can conflate nonconformity, or religious/political difference, with psychological maladjustment. In the end, true integration across (a) heritable risk and (b) contextual influences that transact with such risk remains the holy grail of psychological and psychiatric research and clinical efforts.
Crucially, Lahey is an ardent advocate for the evidence-based position that we cannot rely on cross-sectional data alone. In other words, a longitudinal perspective on developmental pathways and transactional influences is essential. This book would need to transform into a multivolume set to give testimony to the myriad unfolding pathways— at the confluence of genes, temperament, attachment, later parental influences, schooling, neighborhood contexts, and community-/ policy-level influences—that constitute the detailed subject matter of typical versus less typical developmental outcomes. Lahey also strongly contends that examination of differences across sex and gender is crucial for understanding the origins and continuities of psychological adjustment and maladjustment over the life course. Racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and cultural forces must also be part of the equation.
A fundamental perspective throughout the book, as noted in its subtitle, is that a perspective embracing dimensions of psychological problems as opposed to reified categories of disease states can aid in reducing the pervasive stigmatization that still, even in our postmodern era, clings to the subject matter at hand. Much of my own thinking, writing, and research of late focuses on the topic of stigma reduction. There’s no room for a thorough essay on this subject matter in a book foreword, but evidence is building that at least in some domains, when individuals come to view psychological problems as occurring on a continuum with normative behaviors/thoughts/emotions, social distance and stigmatization will lessen. Indeed, the belief that we all struggle with fluctuations in and out of maladjustment, that some of us are more vulnerable than others to heart disease or depression, and that in the end we’re all human could go an extremely long way.
Even more, research syntheses reveal that when research participants are led to believe that mental disorders are solely the result of biogenetic abnormalities (e.g., being called “brain diseases”), they hold the individuals in question less blameworthy for maladaptive behavior but at the same time perceive them as relatively unchangeable and potentially more violent. This is what our Australian colleague Nick Haslam calls the “mixed blessings” model of ascribing mental disorder solely to biogenetic causes.
Of course, we do want to acknowledge biological vulnerability, in transaction with adverse experiences and environments. Eschewing biological and genetic risk completely could lead to a wrongminded retreat to views from earlier eras that psychological problems are the result of evil spirits—or more recent perspectives that they emanate from weak personal character or exclusively from maladaptive parenting. Note that the inaccurate, denigrating, and now-discounted refrigerator-parent theories of autism or the stereotype of the schizophrenogenic mother are only a few decades behind us.
In the end, beyond policy changes and dissemination efforts that can make evidence-based treatments more accessible to those with psychological issues, humanization is crucial. Personal and family narratives breed enhanced empathy and increased support. As in the case of cancer—a highly stigmatized illness for much of the 20th century—when it’s acceptable to form solidarity with fellow fighters/
survivors and when the general public realizes that there’s no shame involved, attitudes can and do change and reinvigorated scientific and clinical action will ensue. Lahey’s nonsensationalized encapsulations of internalizing, externalizing, and thought problem behaviors in the book’s middle chapters serve as a model of bridging typical versus less typical manifestations of these behavior patterns. Along with more explicitly personal accounts, these can promote resilience as well as family and group support.
Beyond the clarity of his language on each and every page, Lahey is admirably honest in his ability to say “I don’t know . . .” about the sheer complexity of influences and processes related to psychopathology at the onset of the third decade of the 21st century. Clearly, however, he knows a lot. He also tackles a host of long-standing issues and puzzles that continue to plague scientific and clinical efforts. Comorbidity is a core example. Categorical views of mental disorder are simply unable to explain the empirical demonstration that most people experiencing a given form of mental illness often simultaneously or sequentially meet criteria for one or many more additional categories. If mental disorders were truly independent, such joint occurrences (called comorbidities) would be quite rare. Although categorical diagnostic systems cannot explain such well-beyond-chance instances of multiple disorders, dimensional perspectives readily take into account the interlinked and hierarchical nature of psychopathology from a multidimensional perspective. Furthermore, it may well be the case that what appears—spanning childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood—as a series of unfolding conditions (e.g., ADHD to oppositional defiant disorder to substance use disorder to antisocial personality disorder), the dimensional perspective, when enriched by developmental psychopathology, is in synch with the concept of heterotypic continuity. That is, underlying vulnerabilities, subsequently shaped by less than adaptive environmental contexts, can unleash a cascade of age-dependent manifestations of, in this instance, an underlying externalizing dimension. This is quite a different perspective from claiming that the individual in question simply graduates from one form of mental disorder to another independent form.
This book is a clear antidote to the reductionist tendencies that have plagued the field of mental health science since its inception, largely in
the form of all-biology versus all-family or all-psychosocial influences. Lahey also realizes the potential for strength and personal adaptation that can emerge for many individuals who place high on various dimensions of psychological distress.
Is Dimensions of Psychological Problems the definitive answer regarding the nature of and mechanisms underlying psychological problems? Of course not, as Lahey himself would readily admit. Our field is simply not mature enough at the levels of scientific and theoretical understanding. Yet the book should elevate researchers and clinicians alike to a new point of fruitful debate and future directions.
Given the book’s insistence that psychological problems are indeed ordinary, the reader may think that Lahey underestimates or understates the too often severe consequences of such problems. Yet he clearly acknowledges the potential for serious impairments. Even so, I take pains to highlight the relevant devastation that can be part of the mix, involving the crushing levels of despair, hopelessness, financial ruin, family disintegration, and staggering societal costs that can ensue. In fact, as now regularly reported in the media, suicide rates are growing in most (but not all) countries on earth, particularly the United States—especially for young people, particularly girls. The prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders, as well as in-home violence and child maltreatment, is clearly accentuated by the current COVID19 pandemic, with consequences bound to ensue for years to come. The diagnosed prevalence of neurodevelopmental conditions such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorders has skyrocketed during the past two decades (whether the true prevalence is similarly expanding is another huge question). Blatant economic disparities in far too many countries have the potential for ever-growing incidence of serious psychological problems. In short, the sheer waste of human potential brought on by developmentally extreme levels of behavior, thought, and affect is staggering.
There’s another potential danger that a shallow reading of the book’s messages could induce. If, as noted previously, the ultimate conclusion is that the kinds of problems discussed in its pages are so ordinary as to be simple violations of social norms—without taking into account the clear evidence for transactions across heritable risk and contextual forces as the drivers of dysfunction—we could end up in the
nonproductive world of the 1960s when mental illnesses were believed to be mythical, the sole artifacts of repressive political systems, or the products of faulty parenting above all else. On the other hand, we cannot abide a return to the horrific “science” and policies related to the eugenics movements of a century ago. I urge readers to read this book carefully—especially Chapters 8 and 9, in which Lahey explicitly synthesizes rather than fractionates the dual, interacting roles of genes and environments (including not just families but also schools, neighborhoods, and cultures) in shaping individual differences in key behavioral dimensions. In short, despite the supposed simplicity and ordinariness of processes underlying people’s placement on behavioral dimensions, the processes involved are massively complex and still far from adequately understood. Although these chapters will be technically challenging for many readers, their inclusion of both historical and extremely recent research findings and their massively integrationist messages are essential to take in.
I suspect that in the decades to come, the field will come to the conclusion that some of the most severe psychological problems in the domain of psychopathology should actually be recognized as disease states (and perhaps migrate to the field of neurology). This is undoubtedly the case for certain individuals with, for example, autism spectrum disorders (and other neurodevelopmental conditions) in whom certain key genetic sequences are spontaneously altered via copynumber variants. In addition, neural markers and even abnormalities related to highly extreme scores on thought and mood dimensions are increasingly evident (although not yet fully predictive of individual cases), related to some individuals with what we today categorize as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Indeed, in medicine, although systolic and diastolic blood pressure are clearly continuous measures, certain individuals with extremely high levels show qualitative differences from the rest of the population in terms of risk factors and underlying biological mechanisms. In the main, however, most “extreme scorers” are quantitatively but not qualitatively different from those scoring lower.
Overall, I recommend Dimensions of Psychological Problems to a wide variety of students and trainees, clinicians of many stripes, investigators of basic biological and social forces linked to promotion
of serious life adjustment problems, and clinical researchers looking for a sound grounding in dimensional approaches to psychopathology and the transactional forces underlying the tragic suffering and impairment so often linked to extreme psychological problems. Curious and ambitious general readers will also be intrigued and well educated. In the end, we simply can’t afford, any longer, to promote views emphasizing either the supremacy of biology and heritability or the predominance of adverse life experiences and contextual factors, at the expense of the other. My strong prediction is that you’ll come away from Lahey’s integrationist perspective with an appetite whetted to dive deeper, learn more, and promote humanization as an antidote to the still-rampant stigma clinging to the variety of distressing psychological problems that comprise the subject matter of this most important book. Our future as a species depends on such understanding and on relevant research progress and social action.
Stephen P. Hinshaw
University of California, Berkeley University of California, San Francisco January, 2021
Preface
Human beings have adapted to life on Earth remarkably well despite our physical limitations. We’re not the strongest, fastest, or the most fiercely jawed and clawed of the animal species, but as a group, we’re clever and resourceful survivors. Most humans live sufficiently wellnourished lives to find mates and pass their genes to their offspring. In that sense, we’re a Darwinian success story that has gone from a few early humans arising in Africa to the billions that now inhabit Earth. It’s fair to say, moreover, that the human race has done far more than just survive and multiply. We’ve accomplished extraordinary things in art, music, literature, drama, architecture, technology, science, and mathematics.
And yet, our lives are far from perfect. Nearly all of us feel uncomfortable emotions at times—fear, worry, anger, sadness, and the like. Many of us struggle to focus on the details of important tasks that do not easily capture our attention, and large numbers of us behave in a variety of ways that are self-defeating in the long term. More than a few of us use mind-altering substances that give short-term relief at tremendous long-term costs. Some of us experience a world that is not shared with others—seeing, hearing, or believing things that others think belie logic and reality. These experiences often cause us misery and interfere with our relationships with others, our education and jobs, and put us in harm’s way.
This book is written to join with other psychologists and psychiatrists in advocating a new way of thinking about psychological problems that will allow us to understand psychological problems better and minimize their impact on our lives. Many of us believe that a positive revolution in our understanding of psychological problems is needed that rejects key elements of the status quo view held by most psychiatrists and psychologists. This is a manifesto for that revolution, which will require several related changes in thinking: We need to affirm that
there is no qualitative difference in kind between “normal” and “abnormal” psychological functioning. Rather, psychological problems are problematic ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that lie on continuous dimensions from minor to severe. Psychological problems are not distinct categories with clear boundaries among them that have their own separate causes. Instead, the dimensions of psychological problems are correlated rather than distinct, which means that people often experience psychological problems on more than one dimension at the same time. Far from muddling our understanding of the nature and causes of psychological problems, however, viewing psychological problems as correlated dimensions reveals a hierarchy of both overlapping and unique causes of each dimension that should advance our understanding of the origins of psychological problems.
Most important, we must stop believing that psychological problems reflect rare and terrifying “illnesses” of the mind. Psychological problems are ordinary aspects of our lives that lie on a continuum from minor to extreme. Crucially, psychological problems are ordinary in the sense of arising through the same natural processes as all aspects of our behavior. This is true even for people who struggle with extraordinarily disabling psychological problems at the extremes of the continuum. Furthermore, psychological problems are ordinary in the sense of being far more commonplace than we usually think. I present convincing evidence from recent research that shows that the great majority of us will experience uncomfortable and disruptive psychological problems at some time during our lives. That statement may take your breath away, but it should not. I am most definitely not saying that nearly all of us will fall into an abyss of mental disease—that is the ill-conceived and harmful view of psychological problems that we must leave behind. Psychological problems do not arise when a normal mind falls apart; they are just natural aspects of the human experience. Most of us will experience distressing and disruptive psychological problems during some part of our lives that are on natural continua from minor to serious.
This book presents urgent and important reasons for rejecting the dominant model of mental health problems laid out in the current 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association,
and in the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), published by the World Health Organization. Those diagnostic manuals are based on a broken model of psychological problems that causes us more harm than good. This book is not an “anti-psychiatry” statement in any sense, however. My opposition is not to the discipline of psychiatry but, rather, to the ways in which psychological problems are defined in the DSM. My goal is to explain a new way of thinking about psychological problems that will serve all of us better. By “all of us,” I mean both those of us with psychological problems and the psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors, and social workers who do their best to help people with their problems. Many professionals are ready to give that broken model up, but because the DSM view is deeply entrenched, others will feel threatened by what I say.
Some of the important ideas behind this book were first expressed by prescient psychologists and psychiatrists more than 50 years ago, but their views failed to become the dominant way of thinking about psychological problems. Their time had not yet come. Today, however, I am one voice in a growing clamor from an international group of leading psychologists and psychiatrists who are advocating these and other new ideas. The difference is that there is now remarkable new scientific evidence that I believe is strong enough to give these ideas sufficient weight to break from outdated ways of thinking. A tipping point has been reached. Although what we don’t know about psychological problems in still much greater than what we do know, the time is right to pull together what has been learned by science recently to articulate this revolutionary view of psychological problems in a way that can gain more traction than in the past.
This book on psychological problems is grounded equally in science and humanism. Psychological problems are not caused by failures of character and are not products of diseased minds. Rather, they are ordinary, if often very painful, outcomes of individual differences in normal psychological processes. The strongest argument for a humanistic view of psychological problems comes from the new scientific data reported here. My strong hope is that thinking about psychological problems in dimensional terms will reduce our tendency to stigmatize them in ourselves and others. It will be much more difficult to stigmatize psychological problems when we accept that almost all
of us will experience them at some point in our lives. Stigma makes the lives of everyone with psychological problems markedly worse by making it difficult to seek help when it’s needed, creating barriers that make adaptive functioning more difficult, and adding layers of negative feelings about our psychological problems that worsen them unnecessarily.
This book shows how we can and why we should replace the diagnostic categories of DSM and ICD with an entirely dimensional model of psychological problems. To a much greater extent than at any time in human history, we now have enough data to present a comprehensive description of the dimensions of psychological problems. Even so, writing such a description of the nature of psychological problems requires extrapolation from, and even speculation based on, what has been discovered by science to date. In my professional life, I have worked in the trenches of psychological research. It is time, however, for me to step aside from that role long enough to describe the big picture of psychological problems as we now understand them, even if that sometimes means making educated guesses about topics that are still understudied. I am fully aware that it is always premature to write a book like this, and I want readers to be equally aware of that fact. I will be careful to distinguish statements about human problems that are based on replicated evidence from hypotheses that go beyond the current data. If one is to pause in the midst of the ongoing work of science to write out what has been learned to date in a comprehensive narrative, this is the best one can do. This means, of course, that new data in the future could invalidate some or even most of what I write. The goal of science, after all, is to become increasingly less wrong in our understanding of nature over time.
This book is written for the educated general public and for psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors, and social workers who work in clinical practice or academia. It is particularly intended for students and residents who will be entering the helping professions because the world in which they will work is rapidly changing and they need to understand why.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to Stephen Hinshaw for commenting on early drafts of the chapters in extremely helpful ways and for writing the insightful Foreword to the book. I also most sincerely thank Howard Abikoff, Brooks Applegate, Caryn Carlson, Avshalom Caspi, Paul Frick, Estelle Higgins, Robert Krueger, Terrie Moffitt, Millicent Perkins, Henning Tiemeier, and Frank Verhulst for their often very detailed comments on the manuscript as it progressed. If this book has something useful to offer, it is largely because of their very generous efforts, trenchant challenges, and insightful suggestions.
1 Conceptualizing Psychological Problems
Human lives are generally successful and often quite wonderful, yet they are easily derailed, frequently at odds with our needs, and too often punctuated by misery. Sometimes, our woes are caused by events that are completely out of our control, such as floods, pandemics, racism, and economic injustice, but our misery and dysfunction often arise from, and are an inherent part of, our own behavior. That is the topic of this book. Psychological problems are simply aspects of our behavior—broadly defined in this book to include ways of thinking, perceiving, feeling, and acting—that cause us distress or interfere with functioning in important areas of our lives.
This straightforward and pragmatic definition of psychological problems is offered as an alternative to the current view that dominates thinking about psychological problems in the Western world today. Like a growing number of other psychologists and psychiatrists,1–5 I have come to believe that the way that we currently view psychological problems has caused us no end of difficulties. Specifically, the current 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), published by the American Psychiatric Association, and the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), published by the World Health Organization, conceptualize psychological problems as binary categories of mental disorders that reflect dysfunctional mental processes within the individual that are qualitatively different from “normal” mental processes. This view of psychological problems, which I refer to as the DSM model for brevity, is deeply embedded in our everyday conceptions of psychological problems and is both misleading and dangerous. Simply put, the issue is this: The way in which we define and understand psychological problems is fundamentally important because it determines
how we think and feel about them—and how we think and feel about psychological problems determines what we do about them. This book urges you to reconsider how you view psychological problems and encourages you to leave behind the DSM view of categories of mental disorders.
Human beings have tried to understand psychological problems since at least the beginnings of recorded history, and, sadly, most of our attempts to understand them have been counterproductive. Our earliest views treated people with psychological problems as if their problems were caused by gods, demons, or moral turpitude. The medical model of psychological problems, which became dominant in Western countries around the turn of the 19th century, brought people with psychological problems into the care of physicians rather than priests or the lay wardens of asylums. The medical model of psychological problems was spelled out 2,400 years ago by Hippocrates, who believed that psychological problems were manifestations of imbalances in the four fluids or humors of the body—blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The medical model of psychological problems was given new life in the 1800s, however, by the truly astonishing discovery by Richard Krafft-Ebing and others that the germs that cause syphilis sometimes infect the brain, resulting in the then common debilitating syndrome of psychosis and cognitive deterioration known as general paresis. Using scientific methods that now seem crude and unethical, Krafft-Ebing vaccinated persons who displayed general paresis—who were almost certainly in no state to give informed consent to be in his experiments—with puss from syphilitic chancres. Krafft-Ebing found that they responded to the vaccinations as if they already were infected with syphilis. He correctly deduced that the syphilis infection also caused general paresis. When the successful treatment of syphilis with penicillin was perfected during World War II, the previously high number of new cases of persons entering asylums each year with general paresis fell nearly to zero in the Western world. It was an electrifying scientific triumph! Understandably, this truly remarkable advance in alleviating human suffering led to the optimistic belief that every kind of psychological problem would eventually be found to be caused by germs affecting the brain. The parallel discovery that typhoid infections sometimes cause severe psychological problems6 only
added to this optimistic view. These discoveries led to the belief that psychological problems are actually medical problems and led to the current belief that medical doctors are the professionals who should treat psychological problems.
There is, of course, every reason to provide medical treatments to persons with treatable infections that cause psychological problems. Very few other infections that cause psychological problems subsequently have been discovered, however. This fact should have led to a delimited medical model of psychological problems, but it did not. Very unfortunately, the medical model took on a much broader metaphorical meaning when few additional links between germs and psychological problems were discovered. The logic of the modern medical model was extended to metaphorical “diseases of the mind”— syndromes of mental “symptoms” without known biological illnesses.7
For some scholars who endorse this contemporary medical model, the analogical use of the term “mental illness” is justified by the expectation that the discoveries of the biological “illnesses” in the brain underlying every mental disorder will come in the future.7 For other contemporary medical model theorists, however, the term mental illness is simply an apt metaphor in which “illnesses of the mind” are analogous to illnesses of the brain.8 For them, mental illnesses are “real” whether we understand their biological basis or not. Most psychologists and psychiatrists active today were trained to believe that they can discern the difference between “normal” and “abnormal” minds and thereby “diagnose mental illnesses.” This is an entirely fictional and baseless notion, however, that is toxic to people with psychological problems.
The DSM Model of Psychological Problems
The definition of mental disorder in the DSM-5 states that “a mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotional regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes that underlie mental and behavioral functioning” (p. 20).9 This is a contemporary version of the analogical medical
model of psychological problems. To its credit, DSM-5 no longer refers to psychological problems as mental illnesses, as was the case in the first editions of the DSM. Nonetheless, the foundations of the current DSM in the medical model are revealed in its use of the medical terms of “symptom,” “diagnosis,” and “psychopathology.” The term psychopathology is particularly telling because it is a direct synonym for mental illness (i.e., psycho = “mental” and pathology = “illness”). Indeed, the introduction to DSM-5 explicitly posits a clear line between having a mental disorder and being normal: “It requires clinical training to recognize . . . a psychopathological condition in which physical signs and symptoms exceed normal ranges” (p. 19).9
As stated in the Preface, this book should not be read as an “antipsychiatry” diatribe. My opposition is not to the field of psychiatry, but to the ways in which psychological problems are conceptualized and defined in the DSM. My goal is to address key issues regarding how we think about psychological problems in the context of recent empirical evidence and to advocate a dimensional way of conceptualizing psychological problems that will better serve both those of us who experience psychological problems and the professionals who do their best to help people with their problems. I am just one of many voices in what is becoming a loud clamor for the kinds of changes in thinking outlined in this book. The differences between the DSM view and a dimensional approach to psychological problems are very important, and we ask you to hear us out.
I acknowledge here that I played a minor role in the fourth and fifth editions of the DSM. I was a member of the DSM-IV work group that defined the mental disorders that typically begin in childhood, and I was the director of the DSM-IV field trials for the kinds of psychological problems that I later refer to in this book as externalizing problems in children and adolescents.10,11 In addition, I served as a consultant to the DSM-5 work group on these problems. I never accepted the medical model of mental disorders, but I saw the DSM as a necessary evil when I did that work. Because the DSM dominated thinking about psychological problems, and governed access to insurance reimbursement, I decided to use data as best as I could to guide the selection of symptoms and diagnostic thresholds. If DSM had to exist, I thought it should be based on solid empirical evidence. The big
change in my thinking is that I now believe the DSM either should no longer exist or that DSM-6 should adopt a fully dimensional model such as the one presented in this book. Audacious proclamations such as this one should be ignored unless they are backed by sound arguments, of course. That is what I hope to accomplish in this book.
A “New” Model of Psychological Problems
This book argues that it is past time to discard the medical model of psychological problems and replace it with a simpler and more pragmatic model. In one sense, this will require a revolution in thinking. Moving from DSM to the thinking expressed in this book is a big change and that will be difficult for many to accept. Several key aspects of the approach advocated in this book are not new at all, however. The first and most important intellectual shots in the revolution that I advocate were fired by prescient scholars more than 50 years ago. In particular, psychologist Albert Bandura12 pragmatically defined “abnormal behavior” without reference to mental illness simply as “behavior that is harmful to the individual or departs widely from accepted social and ethical norms” (p. 10). Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz13 similarly advocated replacing the term of mental illness with Harry Stack Sullivan’s far less judgmental phrase, problems in living. 14 Szasz has been widely misunderstood as denying the existence psychological problems. He explicitly did not do so, but he denied the meaningfulness of the concept of mental illnesses based on an analogy to medical illness.
Like Bandura, then, I define psychological problems in this book as any aspect of behavior—referring broadly to our feelings, thoughts, perceptions, motives, and actions—that is distressing or impairs our successful functioning in school, work, families, or in other important areas of life. Human beings behave in a diversity of different ways, and some of these individual differences in our behavior make us miserable and interfere with our lives. If that is the case for you, you have a psychological problem in the simple, pragmatic, and nonjudgmental sense that I am advocating. Conversely, if your ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving are working well for you, then you do not have
