A final important point concerns how to interpret and understand the phenomenon of comorbidity utilizing results from previous factor analytic work and from work in the current study. As noted earlier, the purpose of the current study was an attempt to provide a complementary descriptive perspective on psychopathology by examining how comorbidity could be understood, when examined as clusters of persons occurring along dimensions of psychopathology. Results from the current study suggest that certain forms of psychopathology – i.e., major depression, social phobia, and PTSD – appear to “link” the dimensions, in addition to a multimorbid class. Thus, these findings could be interpreted from a purely mathematical and statistical point of view, without attributing a deeper meaning to the latent classes we found in the current study.
