Comorbidity and taxometrics

In the functional mental disorders, where conjointly definitive pathophysiology and etiology are unknown or nonexistent, a disease entity is specified syndromically, by the statistical relations of signs, symptoms, traits, tests, and other data. The very concept of comorbidity becomes problematic, and its application to individual patients is difficult. Coherent cut kinetics, the taxometric method composed of multiple procedures (e.g., MAMBAC, MAXCOV, MAXSLOPE, MAXEIG, L-Mode) developed by Meehl and colleagues is a partial objective solution. The importance of the INUS condition, a concept from philosophy of science, is explained. Four situations of putative comorbidity are defined with explanations of how taxometric results would distinguish them.