How Environment and Epigenetics Lead to Reduced Self-Regulation and the Development of Related Mental Disorders: A Computational Multi-Level Adaptive Dynamical System Analysis

In recent years, it has been found that the way in which environmental factors can lead to the development of mental disorders can often be explained by biological mechanisms that involve epigenetic changes of gene expression. This book introduces a multidisciplinary computational approach to model, formalise and analyse the interplay of environment and epigenetics in the development of mental disorders. It is shown how five levels of control can be distinguished in a biologically motivated manner and used to obtain a multilevel adaptive dynamical system architecture for how environmental factors via epigenetic changes can lead to reduced self-regulation of different types that in turn are related to different mental disorders. Furthermore, it is shown how such a multilevel adaptive dynamical system architecture with five levels of control can be formalised, simulated and analysed by self-modeling temporal-causal network models. The approach is illustrated for a wide variety of mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, autism, burnout, ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, antisocial personality disorder, psychopathy, and more.