LEVERAGING MULTIVARIATE GENOMIC METHODS TO ANSWER LONGSTANDING QUESTIONS IN PSYCHIATRY

Do common sets of etiological mechanisms underly risk for diagnostically and phenomenologically distinct mental disorders? Do mental disorders represent extreme manifestations of continuous traits or qualitatively distinct entities with unique genetic causes? Do mental and behavioral traits constitute coherent entities with etiological mechanisms that operate uniformly on their constituent components? These questions have been the topics of considerable inquiry and debate through much of the 20th and 21st centuries. I provide a historical and conceptual overview of these topics. I then describe how researchers are now applying multivariate methods to data from genome wide association studies to provide rigorous answers to these longstanding questions.