Ever notice how so many clients with depression ruminate, but so do clients with anxiety and trauma? Or how clients with social anxiety frequently buy into negative explanations for what happens, but so do clients with depression? RDoC is an effort understand mental health difficulties in a more encompassing and transdiagnostic way.
RDoC stands for Research Domain Criteria Initiative (you mean it doesn’t indicate who our doctor is?). It is an effort by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to promote new ways to understand mental health. RDoC promotes funding for researchers to investigate shared processes or factors that contribute to a range of difficulties. This comes along with a increasing moves by the field to understand interacting and shared contributors to mental health.
So for instance, how cognitive, developmental, social, emotional, and behavioral processes interact with genetic or biological factors to influence the development of mental health difficulties. Specific examples include how innate temperament, emotion regulation, rumination, and too much or too little approach behaviors contribute to attachment problems in relationships. Or how a learned tendency to avoid interacts with one’s neural chemistry to contribute to trauma symptoms in PTSD.
RDoC promotes a sort of “catch-all” (or “catch-many”) for examining a number of processes that contribute to multiple psychological difficulties. Key examples are rumination in depression, anxiety and other difficulties. Or how attention is impacted by a number of disorders in addition to ADHD. Or the decreased ability to pull attention away from negative information in depression, generalized anxiety, social anxiety, or PTSD.
At the same time, RDoC aims to understand how differences in these processes help differentiate different disorders and tailor treatments for those unique difficulties. For example, what factors explain why mania occurs in bipolar disorders, but not in other disorders? Or for example, examining whether there are differences in how rumination plays out for depression vs anxiety.
RDoC is not just for the researchers out there. We all want to understand which factors are both shared and unique to different difficulties. Some of our brightest are working on helping us get more precise about how we target our existing treatments and develop new ones. Keep an eye out!
