We used Genomic SEM to identify four broad factors (Neurodevelopmental, Compulsive, Psychotic, and Internalizing) that provide a reasonable model of the genetic correlations among 11 major psychiatric disorders. We find that the Compulsive, Psychotic, and Internalizing factors are generally effective at describing the genetic relationships between psychiatric disorders at biobehavioral, functional genomic, and molecular levels of analysis. At the biobehavioral level, the pattern of associations with external correlates was informative with respect to the shared and distinct characteristics across the disorders. For example, the accelerometer results displayed both divergent patterns of findings across the factors and convergent patterns for the disorders within a factor. This provides evidence for both the validity and the utility of the genetic factor model for characterizing genetic associations with basic aspects of everyday functioning that may be, at face, relatively distal from the biological mechanisms of the disorders themselves. Results were less consistent with respect to the utility of a Neurodevelopmental disorders factor. For example, the Neurodevelopmental disorders factor exhibited much higher degrees of heterogeneity with respect to relationships with external correlates and with respect to effects of individual variants, a finding that seemed to be largely driven by divergent patterns for AUT.
