María Dolores Braquehais Conesa, M.D., Ph.D.

Complex systems such as the biopsychosociocultural constitution of the human being need to be approached with new converging explanatory frameworks. Current perspectives in psychiatric research are usually reluctant to include novel ideas coming from other fields such as Anthropology, Sociology, and or Philosophy. What may be the reason for the resistance of the biological paradigm to include valuable information coming from other areas?

The etiological model of unique, clear, and lineal causes for mental health diseases, inspired in the17th Century Sydenham’s model of infectious diseases, can no longer inspire our conceptions about the nature of the brain-mind-context relationship. Current trends in psychiatry should reconsider wider, new, refreshing models such as the Complex Systems Theory.

Friederick von Hayek (1899-1992), the famous Austrian philosopher and economist, believed that economics, in particular, and the sciences of complex phenomena, in general, could not be modeled after the sciences that deal with essentially simple phenomena like physics. Hayek held that complex phenomena (I add such as mental health phenomena), can only allow pattern predictions (through modeling), compared with the precise predictions that can be made out of non-complex phenomena. It is time to incorporate a new multi-level, non-lineal, open-minded model in psychiatric research. Though not all levels can be studied with a similar methodological approach, integrating findings coming from other fields would certainly enrich our comprehension of the complex brain-mind-context interaction.