Mental illness is fundamentally mental, by definition about psychological rather than biological phenomena, but biological phenomena play key roles in understanding, preventing, and treating mental illness. The Research Domain Criteria initiative (RDoC) of the US National Institute of Mental Health is an unusually ambitious effort to foster integration of psychological and biological science in the service of psychopathology research. Some key features and common misunderstandings of RDoC are discussed here.
Keywords: RDoC; categorical diagnosis; dimensional diagnosis; endophenotype; reductionism.