Crisis of objectivity: using a personalized network model to understand maladaptive sensemaking in a patient with psychotic, affective, and obsessive-compulsive symptoms

Psychiatric comorbidities have proven a consistent challenge. Recent approaches emphasize the need to move away from categorical descriptions of symptom clusters towards a dimensional view of mental disorders. From the perspective of phenomenological psychopathology, this shift is not enough, as a more detailed understanding of patients' lived experience is necessary as well. One phenomenology-informed approach suggests that we can better understand the nature of psychiatric disorders through personalized network models, a comprehensive description of a person's lifeworld in the form of salient nodes and the relationships between them. We present a detailed case study of a patient with multiple comorbidities, maladaptive coping mechanisms, and adverse childhood experiences.