Darren Haywood: How mental health is conceptualized within oncology

Darren Haywood, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UTS (University of Technology Sydney), shared a post on X:

“Just published in Trends in Cancer. We provide a critical discussion of how mental health is conceptualized within oncology, and how a reconceptualization may be needed to improve clinical practice and research efforts.

• The diagnostic approach, which conceptualizes psychopathology as binary categories called ‘disorders’, is popular within oncology.
• This approach faces significant limitations which impact its validity, and many of these issues are exacerbated within oncology populations.
• Hierarchical dimensional conceptualizations, such as the HiTOP, help to mitigate these issues by viewing psychopathology as higher and lower-level domains represented on dimensions of severity, instead of by binary categories.
• Hierarchical dimensional conceptualizations facilitate empirically-based and individualized assessment (across symptoms and traits), case conceptualization, and treatment, and offer a platform for more reliable and valid clinical research.
• The hierarchical dimensional conceptualization has not yet been meaningfully applied within cancer survivorship; however, it has significant potential for improving both clinical practice and research within psycho-oncology.
• In this paper we end by providing the next steps needed toward implementing this conceptualisation in psycho-oncology practice and research.

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Source: Darren Haywood/X