Title: Towards a formal integration of clinical case formulation and personalized symptom networks

Co-authors: Sacha Epskamp, Date C. van der Veen, Fabian Dablander, Robert A. Schoevers, Harriëtte Riese, Eiko Fried

Abstract:

The idiographic approach to psychiatry has received significant interest over the past decades. This approach aims to find personalized treatment that is tailored to the specific needs and resources of a given patient. Advances in personalized network estimation are conceptually related to the idea of clinical case formulation, however, such networks come with many technical and practical limitations that make their use as representations of case formulations questionable. In this presentation, we discuss an alternative approach to using personalized networks in clinical practice, by actively incorporating clinical information in the estimation of networks. We introduce PREMISE, the Prior Elicitation Module for Idiographic System Estimation, an interactive point-and-click web application which elicits a clinical prior network as prior information to estimate a Bayesian Vector-Autoregressive model from ESM data. We discuss implications for clinical implementation, as well as ontological discrepancies between constructivist case formulation and the common realist perspectives in statistical modelling.