New Review on State of the Art in Precision Neuropsychiatry
We are happy to share our new review paper, “Beyond Seeing Only Illness in Abnormality: Clinical Challenges and Methodological Promises on the Road Towards Precision Psychiatry”, published in Psychiatry Research Communications.
Precision psychiatry aims to deliver the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. Yet despite substantial methodological advances, translating this vision into clinical practice remains challenging. In this review, Ymke Verduyn identify four interdependent challenges that need to be addressed:
- From diagnostic categories to transdiagnostic mechanisms – moving beyond rigid diagnostic labels towards mechanisms and dimensions shared across disorders.
- From homogeneous groups to individual heterogeneity – recognizing that individuals with the same diagnosis can differ substantially in symptoms, underlying biology, and treatment response.
- From behavioral symptoms to complementary biological markers – integrating neuroimaging and other biological information with behavioral and clinical measures.
- From cross-sectional snapshots to longitudinal trajectories – understanding mental health as a dynamic process that develops and changes over time.
Rather than treating these as separate problems, we argue that addressing them together requires methodological approaches capable of capturing individual variability against the background of normal population variation.
Ultimately, we propose a shift from a predominantly diagnosis-centered perspective towards a health-centered perspective, where individual mental and brain health can be characterized along continuous and potentially longitudinal dimensions.
The review discusses how emerging computational approaches—including normative modelling, dimensional and transdiagnostic methods, biological markers, and longitudinal modelling—can contribute to this transition, while also highlighting the methodological and clinical challenges that remain before precision psychiatry can become a reality.
Read the open-access paper: here
Citation:
Verduyn, Y., Kia, S. M., & Brouwer, H. (2026). Beyond seeing only illness in abnormality: Clinical challenges and methodological promises on the road towards precision psychiatry. Psychiatry Research Communications, 100279. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psycom.2026.100279