Commentary: "Consistent superiority of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors over placebo in reducing depressed mood in patients with major depression"

In the past decades, almost all research in psychiatry and clinical psychology has been directed at the level of disorders, such as major depressive disorder (MDD) or schizophrenia. As has been argued by many scholars in recent work, this organization of the psychiatric research program has yielded limited insights, which justifies the investigation of psychopathology at a more fine-grained level: the level of symptoms (1, 2). In the present letter, we indicate two primary directions for this research program, which we propose to call symptomics. We will focus our discussion on MDD specifically and discuss possibilities in relation to the recently published work by Hieronymus et al. (3).