Denny Borsboom, World Psychiatry 16(1):5–13, February 2017 (online 26 January 2017) — DOI-10.1002/wps.20375
The brief’s citation is correct. Crossref prints the title in sentence case (“A network theory of mental disorders”). Read from the PubMed Central copy, PMC5269502.
Key takeaways
- The network theory denies that most mental disorders have a common cause behind their symptoms. Symptoms cause each other (insomnia → fatigue; delusion → suspicion → isolation → delusion), and a disorder is the self-sustaining activity of a tightly coupled cluster of them.
- The dynamic claim is hysteresis. In a strongly connected network a trigger in the “external field” (a loss, a trauma) can switch the network into an active state that persists after the trigger is removed. A weakly connected network recovers. Normal grief is offered as the weakly connected case.
- Health and disorder become alternative stable states. Resilience and vulnerability become dispositions set by network connectivity, and comorbidity is built in through bridge symptoms shared between disorder clusters.
- Treatment falls into three classes: change a symptom, remove a trigger in the external field, or change the connections. CBT is the paper’s example of the third kind.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the read statement of the
network model of mental disorder, which the psychopathology-and-treatment
blurb names beside the biomedical and biopsychosocial models. It carries no
instruction for machine-learning practice, and its methods (graphical
models estimated from symptom data) are statistics read for psychiatry,
which no anthology topic holds. The Anthology of the SOTA does not hold it
(a grep of its literature.d, notes.d and theory.d for “Borsboom” and the
DOI found nothing).
It bears on the batch and on the record:
- Hofmann and Hayes (LIT-544) name “the complex network approach” as an “analytic alternative to the latent disease model”, through Hofmann, Curtiss and McNally (2016), not through this paper. Borsboom’s third class of treatment, the network intervention, is the kind of target their process-based therapy is after.
- Salkovskis, Sighvatsson and Sigurdsson (LIT-538) describe disorder as being “stuck” in maintaining vicious circles. That is a cognitive version of the same self-sustaining loop, and the two papers arrive at it independently: neither cites the other.
- Kendler (LIT-552) supplies the premise that no common pathogenic pathways have been found. Borsboom cites Kendler’s later papers for it.
- Engel (LIT-548) is the earlier challenge to the disease model, which this paper does not cite.
- Emergence (LIT-150). Rizi locates the onset of emergence with order parameters and phase transitions. Borsboom calls hysteresis “a hallmark of phase transitions” and makes it the mechanism of disorder. Here it is a framework claim: the paper derives it for no measured network, and cites Cramer’s simulations for its existence in “realistically parameterized” ones.
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here belongs in the anthology.