Network Architectures of Personality and Its Pathology

The comorbidity of personality disorders and mental disorders is commonly understood through three types of theoretical models: either (a) personality disorders precede mental disorders, (b) mental disorders precede personality disorders, or (c) mental disorders and personality disorders share common etiological grounds. Although these hypotheses differ with respect to their idea of causal direction, they all imply a latent variable perspective. In this chapter, we aim to provide another meta-theoretical and methodological perspective on this issue. We start this chapter by explicating a relationalist ontology of this type of comorbidity in which we understand mental states and personality traits as ontologically related systems. Using psychometric network models, we endeavor to bridge to the empirical and clinical world and provide an example of a network model of the relations between major depression disorder (MDD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD). The results identify direct associations between symptoms of MDD and BPD.