A cybernetic perspective on the nature of psychopathology: Transcending conceptions of mental illness as statistical deviance and brain disease

Explicitly or implicitly, psychopathology is often defined in terms of statistical deviance, requiring that an affected individual is sufficiently distant from the norm in some dimension of psychological or neural function. In recent decades, the dominant paradigm in psychiatric research has focused primarily on deviance in neural function, treating psychopathology as disease of the brain. We argue that these conceptualizations are misguided. We recently proposed a novel theory of psychopathology, based in cybernetics and drawing additionally from neuroscience, psychometrics, and personality theory (DeYoung & Krueger, 2018a). In this theory, deviations from the norm in psychological and neural functioning serve as important risk factors for psychopathology but are not in themselves necessary or sufficient to identify psychopathology, which requires the presence of cybernetic dysfunction. Psychopathology is defined as persistent failure to move toward one’s goals, due to failure to generate effective new goals, interpretations, or strategies when existing ones prove unsuccessful. We argue that adopting a cybernetic theory to replace conceptualizations of psychopathology as statistical deviance or brain disease would facilitate improvements in measurement, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of psychopathology.