Kendler’s chapter provides a compelling account of how little evolved important premises of twentieth- and twenty-first-century psychopathology concepts represented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals (DSMs) are from frameworks developed in earlier centuries that came to the fore in the nineteenth century, emphasizing a categorical distinction between cognition and emotion in characterizing broad classes of disorders. He then poses questions about how the recent NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative relates to that heritage. The present commentary similarly places RDoC in that tradition yet differentiates RDoC from the DSMs. By design, RDoC is nonreductionistic and initially much less comprehensive and much more research based, largely confining its substantive elements to intersections of well-developed psychological constructs (important in but not confined to) psychopathology with well-developed psychological and biological data. As such, RDoC is much better positioned to support and drive recently growing interest in computational psychiatry.

This chapter addresses three questions posed for the 2018 Copenhagen conference. We argue that reduction in the widely assumed sense of eliminating psychological constructs is not a feasible option in psychopathology research. We argue that the popular “levels of analysis” metaphor is more problematic than helpful. We argue that a recent movement in philosophy of science, known as the new mechanists, offers a promising alternative to the naïve biological reductionism that has driven much thinking and research on psychopathology in the Decades of the Brain. Finally, we evaluate the NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative in the context of these three questions, citing key features that facilitate moving clinical research forward more quickly and more effectively than what has characterized the field for decades. RDoC avoids reductionism, fosters integration of psychological and biological constructs, methods, and data, and is well suited to the emerging research agenda in the psychopathology literature.