Elemental psychopathology: distilling constituent symptoms and patterns of repetition in the diagnostic criteria of the DSM-5.

Background: The features hundreds of diagnoses comprising a multitude of symptoms, and there is considerable repetition in the symptoms among diagnoses. This repetition undermines what we can learn from studying individual diagnostic constructs because it can obscure both disorder- and symptom-specific signals. However, these lost opportunities are currently veiled because symptom repetition in the has not been quantified.