Reimann, Gabrielle E.; Allee, Bergen; Derr, Tyler; Jeong, Hee Jung; Archer, Camille; Durham, E. Leighton; Ellis, Kaitlynn E.; Chang, Catie; Kaczkurkin, Antonia N. (2026).听.听Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 122, 103199.听
This study looked at how different mental health symptom groups relate to one another, because that can help improve how psychiatric conditions are classified. The researchers focused on 鈥渋nternalizing鈥� symptoms, which include fear, worry, sadness, avoidance, and feeling highly alert or tense. They analyzed responses from six questionnaires covering depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in a community sample of 2,051 young adults ages 17 to 23. Using a network approach, which treats symptoms as connected to one another rather than as isolated conditions, they measured how close different symptom groups were to each other. The results showed that depression and generalized anxiety were especially closely linked, and PTSD was also most similar to those two groups. By contrast, panic, social anxiety, and OCD did not clearly form one separate 鈥渇ear鈥� group and were less consistently related to the other symptom domains. Overall, the findings support the idea that depression, generalized anxiety, and possibly PTSD may share a common distress-related dimension, while providing less support for a distinct fear-based grouping of social anxiety, panic, and OCD.
FIG. 1
Exploratory graph analysis depicting the network structure of symptoms across six psychological constructs. Note: B = Beck Depression Inventory-II; G = Generalized Anxiety Disorder鈭�7; S = Social Phobia Inventory; PD = Panic Disorder Severity Scale; PS = Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Scale-Self Report for DSM鈭�5; O = Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised.