Bridge Centrality: A Network Approach to Understanding Comorbidity

Recently, researchers in clinical psychology have endeavored to create network models of the relationships between symptoms, both within and across mental disorders. Symptoms that connect two mental disorders are called "bridge symptoms." Unfortunately, no formal quantitative methods for identifying these bridge symptoms exist. Accordingly, we developed four network statistics to identify bridge symptoms: bridge strength, bridge betweenness, bridge closeness, and bridge expected influence. These statistics are nonspecific to the type of network estimated, making them potentially useful in individual-level psychometric networks, group-level psychometric networks, and networks outside the field of…