More phenomenology in psychiatry? Applied ontology as a method towards integration

There have been renewed calls to use phenomenology in psychiatry to improve knowledge about causation, diagnostics, and treatment of mental health conditions. A phenomenological approach aims to elucidate the subjective experiences of mental health, which its advocates claim have been largely neglected by current diagnostic frameworks in psychiatry (eg, DSM-5). The consequence of neglecting rich phenomenological information is a comparatively more constrained approach to theory development, empirical research, and care programmes. Although calls for more phenomenology in psychiatry have been met with enthusiasm, there is still relatively little information on how to practically facilitate this integration. In this Personal View, we argue that phenomenological approaches need a shared semantic framework to drive their innovative potential, thus enabling consistent data capture, exchange, and interoperability with current mental health data and informatics approaches (eg, the Research Domain Criteria project). We show how an applied ontology of phenomenological psychopathology offers a suitable method to address these challenges.