Perceived causal symptom network of adolescent mental health issues

Abstract

Adolescent mental health is difficult to capture in categories such as depression or specific anxiety disorders. An alternative is to  approach psychiatric symptoms as causal networks, potentially revealing feedback loops that maintain a pathological state. One  approach to creating such networks, implemented in the PECAN methodology, is to ask adolescents about their perceptions of the causes to their symptoms. For this purpose, a transdiagnostic item list was created, and adolescents who screened positive for depression (N =  55) completed twice in two weeks a survey quantifying perceptions of causality between their mental health problems. A network that  was averaged across all participants was reliable and revealed three strong feedback loops: a first loop running through stress, insomnia,  fatigue, procrastination, and back to stress; a second loop between stress and overthinking; and a third loop between stress  and procrastination. Although all adolescents in the study screened positive for depression, symptoms of depression were not  particularly central to the network. Instead, the most central symptoms were procrastination and overthinking. The average test-retest  reliability for individual networks was low, limiting clinical application. In conclusion, PECAN was found to be reliable and useful when  creating a group-level network of adolescent mental health problems. While informative at a group level, the method should be improved  before it can be used to inform treatment at the individual level.