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Integrative Paradigms for Knowledge Discovery in Mental Health: Overcoming the Fragmentation of Knowledge Inherent in Disparate Theoretical Paradigms

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Mental Health Informatics

Part of the book series: Health Informatics ((HI))

Abstract

The domain of mental health is inherently complex, spanning across multiple disciplines, data types, descriptive levels, and approaches. This complexity has brought considerable challenges in terms of how to facilitate efficient knowledge discovery and integration across disciplines in the domain. The vocabulary and semantic frameworks in use across these different descriptive levels are fragmented and contested, and it is difficult to gain an overview of what is known across all the relevant bodies of knowledge and practice. In this chapter, we review progress that has recently been made towards integrative semantic and computational frameworks for structuring and advancing mental health research. This includes the paradigm shift incubated in the NIMH’s RDoC effort, which offers a roadmap for studying the nature of the complex interactions within and between human systems: biological (body, brain), mental (mind), behavioral, social, and environmental. We also review computational approaches to infer and model relationships between entities that explicitly cross levels of explanation and disciplinary boundaries. We describe the quantitative methods that are used to integrate and analyze across heterogeneous datasets, and the epistemological challenges that face the field when attempting to determine mechanistic explanations that move the global understanding of mental health forward.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that the DSM is also discussed in some detail in Chap. 5.

  2. 2.

    https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research/research-funded-by-nimh/rdoc/constructs/rdoc-matrix.shtml

  3. 3.

    Note that ‘correlation’ is used broadly here, to cover several different statistical measures in practice: various different correlation measures or other co-variance metrics may be used.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, London, UK

    Janna Hastings

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto Mississauga, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen

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  1. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Jessica D. Tenenbaum

  2. Six Aims for Behavioral Health, Minneapolis, MN, USA

    Piper A. Ranallo

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Hastings, J., Larsen, R.R. (2021). Integrative Paradigms for Knowledge Discovery in Mental Health: Overcoming the Fragmentation of Knowledge Inherent in Disparate Theoretical Paradigms. In: Tenenbaum, J.D., Ranallo, P.A. (eds) Mental Health Informatics. Health Informatics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70558-9_12

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