Understanding the makeup of mental disorders has great value for both research and practice in psychopathology. The richer and more detailed our compositional explanations of mental disorder—that is, comprehensive accounts of client signs and symptoms—the more information we have to inform etiological explanations, classification schemes, clinical assessment, and treatment. However, at present, no explicit compositional explanations of psychopathology have been developed and the existing descriptive accounts that could conceivably fill this role—DSM/ICD syndromes, transdiagnostic and dimensional approaches, symptom network models, historical accounts, case narratives, and the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)—fall short in critical ways. In this article, we discuss what compositional explanations are, their role in scientific inquiry, and their importance for psychopathology research and practice. We then explain why current descriptive accounts of mental disorder fall short of providing such an explanation and demonstrate how effective compositional explanations could be constructed.

了解精神障碍的构成对精神病理学的研究和实践都具有重要价值。我们的成分解释越丰富越详细精神障碍——即对来访者体征和症状的全面描述——我们需要为病因解释、分类方案、临床评估和治疗提供更多信息。然而，目前，还没有对精神病理学进行明确的成分解释，现有的描述性描述可以想象地填补这一角色——DSM/ICD 综合征、跨诊断和维度方法、症状网络模型、历史记录、案例叙述和研究领域标准 (RDoC)——在关键方面达不到要求。在本文中，我们将讨论什么是成分解释、它们在科学探究中的作用以及它们对精神病理学研究和实践的重要性。