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Category: Communication

Description: Keynote at NVP winter congress. Abstract: "Systems are everywhere: the climate system, the train system, the healthcare system, and the political system. In the last two decades, complex systems approaches have enabled considerable advances in explanation and prediction across a range of disciplines, including ecology, meteorology, and medicine. Here I introduce a systems approach to mental health problems, where disorders like depression are conceptualised as emergent states arising from dynamic interactions among bio-psycho-social elements. I show that this perspective provides utility for description, prediction, understanding, and treatment. It offers new lenses through which to study mental illness (e.g., attractor states, phase transitions), and new levers to treat them (e.g., early warning signals, novel treatment targets)."