Everyone who has a foot in the world of psychiatric diagnosis seems to agree that our diagnostic system could, at the very least, use some updating, if not burning it down and starting over.

So how do we approach developing constructs of psychiatric diagnoses that are more complex, more accurate, more flexible, and more context-specific than what we’ve been taught or what exists in the DSM-V?

Today, I’m excited to share my conversation with Dr. Miri Forbes, an expert in psychopathology and one of the authors of the paper, “Reconstructing Psychopathology: A Data-Driven Reorganization of the Symptoms in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” 

Dr. Forbes and her colleagues are doing innovative research on creating more empirically-supported diagnostic constructs. 

This approach to symptoms, categorization, and how we think about and use diagnostic constructs is one that I hope will help us get out of the habit of taking our current diagnostic constructs too literally.

Dr. Forbes, an Associate Professor at Macquarie University's School of Psychological Sciences, is focused on improving our understanding of the empirical structure of psychopathology based on the specific patterns in which symptoms of mental disorders tend to co-occur.

She is an Associate Editor of The Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science,and serves on the Editorial Boards of Clinical Psychological Science and The Journal of Emotion and Psychopathology. Additionally, Dr. Forbes is a member of the Executive Board of the international Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) Consortium.