Treatment of general psychopathology

Purpose and aims: There is so much comorbidity among psychiatric conditions that one can combine them into a single general psychopathology index. Although general psychopathology predicts adverse outcomes, it remains unknown if it responds to intervention.

Therefore, we will estimate the causal effect of psychosocial interventions and psychotropic medications on general psychopathology.

Method: We will apply casual inference designs (children-of-siblings design; co-twin control/within-individual design; instrumental variable; and front-door criterion) to data from the Swedish Twin Register and Swedish population registers to estimate the effect of childrearing conditions (year 1), psychotherapy (years 2-3), and psychotropic medication (years 1-5) on general psychopathology (derived from self/parent-reported symptoms and psychiatric diagnoses).

The principal investigator will devote 50% of his time to this project, and he is supported by experts in epidemiology, psychotherapy, and psychiatry.

Importance: Even though comorbidity is the rule rather than exception in psychiatry, most randomized clinical trials exclude individuals with several disorders. Therefore, there is a lack of knowledge of the effect of treatment on comorbidity.

By applying innovative causal inference designs to large observational data, we aim to study the effect of treatment on general psychopathology in the best conceivable way. This could open a new area of research into transdiagnostic treatments.