[Network analysis by systemic text excavation of the concept of personalized psychiatry and precision]

The current challenges of psychiatric nosology and semiology are part of an interdisciplinary and integrative framework. The paradigm of the personalized and precision psychiatry proposes to study this discipline according to new approaches and methodologies. Personalized and precision psychiatry therefore requires clarification of its concepts. To our knowledge, there is no systematic exploration of the literature on the application of the concepts of personalized and precision medicine in the field of psychiatry. This article proposes thus to explore the framework of personalized and precision medicine applied to psychiatry.

We explored the framework of personalized and precision medicine applied to psychiatry by a textual network analysis. Firstly, we performed a systematic text-mining (Natural Language Processing) from an exhaustive review of the international literature with the terms "precision psychiatry" and "personalized psychiatry". Secondly, this analysis of textual data allowed us to build a textual network which made it possible to visualize the most proximal terms (the most frequently associated in the literature). Finally, we extracted from the network the main dimensions explored in the scientific literature, and we studied the relative importance of each term by analyzing the network centrality. In addition, a brief bibliometric analysis was conducted.

We show that personalized and precision psychiatry refers to six dimensions found in the textual network analysis which correspond to the scientific fields which study personalized and precision psychiatry: genetics, pharmacogenetics, artificial intelligence, therapeutic trials, biomarkers and staging. We explore how each dimension relates to the mechanization of psychiatric disorders. However, precision and personalized psychiatry, which tries to refine the levels of mechanistic explanations for psychiatry, suffers from a conceptual heterogeneity. Indeed, textual analysis also allows us to find terms referring to a set of heterogeneous concepts. Many methodological fields and epistemological concepts are invoked in this literature, without standardization.

The paradox of personalized and precision psychiatry is to associate a strong conceptual heterogeneity with a well-defined mechanistic component. Heterogeneity found in literature on personalized and precision psychiatry testifies to the lack of a pluralist and integrative theoretical framework. This framework could be based on a naturalizing but non-reducing formalism, aware of the societal challenges of the sciences and their implementation in the research and clinical systems of psychiatry.