An alternative approach is that the diagnoses remain unchanged, but a separate section in diagnostic manuals addresses considerations for particularly comorbid presentations. As many psychiatric medications are already prescribed universally across disorders (e.g., SSRIs; Vaswani, Linda, & Ramesh, 2003), future mechanistic studies offer the opportunity to make more informed decisions around identifying transdiagnostic biological targets. Medications that regulate these targets might then be considered as first line treatments for particularly comorbid presentations and ultimately reduce growing levels of psychiatric polypharmacy (Mojtabai & Olfson, 2010). Without any diagnostic revision, we might also consider an explicit goal of patient psychoeducation to clarify that individuals diagnosed with multiple disorders do not face an overwhelming array of independent problems. Rather, receiving multiple psychiatric diagnoses ultimately reflects overlapping risk pathways indicated across convergent lines of evidence from phenotypic, genetic, and environmental research.
