By Daniel Dunaief

Instead of lamenting the shortcomings of a system they felt didn’t work as well as it should, Roman Kotov and a growing group of collaborators whose numbers now exceed 50 decided to do something about it. An associate professor of psychiatry at Stony Brook University, Kotov and his collaborators are building their own mental health tool, which, they hope, will offer specific diagnoses for everything from anxiety to schizophrenia.

The current resource psychologists and psychiatrists use is called the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5,” which came out in 2013. The latest version of the DSM, as the manual that offers psychologists and psychiatrists a way to link a collection of symptoms to a diagnosis is called, “felt far too limited,” Kotov said. “Once we started discussing [an alternative], almost everyone was interested in the scientific community. They thought it was a good and necessary idea.”

Called the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology, or HiTOP, the developing classification system uses scientific evidence, illness symptoms and impaired functioning in its diagnoses. Another HiTOP co-creator, David Watson, the Andrew J. McKenna Family professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, recognized Kotov’s important early work on the project.

Kotov “deserves sole credit for the idea of putting all of our data together to provide the basis for an alternative model,” Watson explained in an email. “He did some preliminary work along these lines, which convinced us that this was a great idea that was worth pursuing.” Watson, who served as Kotov’s graduate adviser at the University of Iowa, said that his former student leads meetings and conference calls for the HiTOP group.

The HiTOP system, which was recently described in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, views mental disorders along a spectra, while also using empirical evidence to understand overlap among disorders and classify different symptoms within a given diagnosis. As an example, Kotov said that depression in the DSM is “treated as one thing. We know that depression is heterogeneous.”

Indeed, some people with depression may have lost their appetite and have trouble sleeping, while others may be eating and sleeping considerably more than they would if they weren’t depressed. “In some ways, these are opposite presentations, yet they get the same diagnosis” in the DSM, Kotov said.

HiTOP unpacks this variability into seven dimensions, which describe symptom types. That is helpful not only for a diagnosis but also for a treatment. HiTOP also goes beyond the binary description of the presence or absence of a particular symptom, offering clinicians a way of indicating the severity of a problem. At this point, HiTOP is a developing prototype and not a completed diagnostic tool. The scientists developing this tool have made inroads in four primary areas: anxiety and depression, substance use problems, personality problems and psychotic disorders.

“The HiTOP system currently is incomplete, as it primarily focuses on more common and widely studied forms of psychopathology,” Watson suggested, “but mental health professionals certainly could use it to assess/ diagnose a broad range of conditions.” Mental health professionals can view this new resource at the website https://medicine.stonybrookmedicine.edu/HITOP.

Kotov hopes this new paradigm will “focus on science and do everything we can to keep unpolitical, nonscientific considerations out of it,” he said. “We hope that it provides the most up-to-date alternative” to the DSM. The HiTOP approach, Kotov said, relies more heavily on scientific evidence, which can include genetic vulnerabilities, environmental risk factors and neurobiological abnormalities.

Kotov, who is working on several projects, said HiTOP takes about a quarter of his time. He is also involved with a long-term study of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders, which was started in the early 1990s, before he arrived at Stony Brook in 2006.

Kotov is following up on this cohort, looking at outcomes for treatment and analyzing risk factors and processes that determine the course of an illness. He is also leading a study on first responders to the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center, which is exploring the physical and emotional consequences of participating in the response to the unprecedented attack.

Kotov and his collaborators are investigating the health of responders in their daily life using mobile technology. They are also studying how personalities affect their health, which may soon help guide personalized treatment.

Another project involves the study of children who are 14 to 17 years old and explores the emotional growth and personality development. This study includes reports, surveys and interviews. During those years, “much happens as far as personality development,” Kotov said.

Colleagues at Stony Brook praised Kotov’s scientific contributions. Kotov is a “rising star” and is “perhaps best known for his work on the role of personality in psychopathology and, increasingly, for work on classification of psychiatric disorders,” Daniel Klein, a distinguished professor in the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook, wrote in an email.

A resident of Port Jefferson, Kotov lives with his wife Tatiana, who is a controller for a small company in Manhattan. The couple has two young daughters. Kotov grew up in Russia in a small town near Moscow. He was always interested in science and developed a particular curiosity about psychology when a high school psychology teacher sparked his interest when he was 15.

As for the HiTOP effort, Kotov is convinced this endeavor will offer the mental health community a valuable tool. “We believe that describing patients more accurately, precisely and reliably will help provide better and more personalized care,” he said.