The National Institute of Mental Health Research Domain Criteria

The United States National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative offers a framework to facilitate integrative research to clarify core mechanisms of human mental distress and dysfunction. The RDoC was developed to provide an alternative to research, designed around clinical syndromes based on descriptive diagnosis. Rather than beginning with a syndrome and then working ‘down’ to clarify mechanisms, the aim of the RDoC is to guide research that begins with disruptions in neurobiological and behavioural mechanisms, and then works across systems to clarify connections among such disruptions and clinical symptoms. The RDoC also departs from widely accepted categorical diagnoses, instead advocating a dimensional account of clinically significant variance in disrupted mechanisms and symptoms. The need for the RDoC stemmed from the realization that psychopathology research was not keeping pace with advances in clinical neuroscience and behavioural science, and the recognition that the cycle of scientific progress has been hampered by the instantiation of DSM diagnoses as the starting point of psychiatric research design. This chapter details the rationale and development of the RDoC and describes their structure. Some practical considerations and theoretical matters for implementing the RDoC alternative are considered.