Toward meaningful networks: How qualitative research can inform idiographic assessment and personalized care

With the aim of personalized care, an idiographic framework and network-based diagnoses are gaining momentum in psychology. This strongly relies on intensive longitudinal monitoring using experience-sampling methods. However, the conceptualization, validity, and clinical utility of current idiographic approaches require further scrutiny. Personalized care cannot be founded on technological and statistical developments alone. Strikingly, current developments have largely neglected patients' perspectives. To enhance meaningful idiographic assessment and care, this article presents a qualitative research approach centralizing patient experiences. We take youth depression as a timely illustrative example. In the context of a community-based ambulatory setting, 19 adolescents with a diagnosis of depression (currently or in the past) were interviewed. A grounded theory study resulted in one core category: suffering from an inextricable web of problems. Depressed adolescents felt like slipping away, asked existential questions, and experienced a fragile identity. Feeling alone but not wanting to be a burden hindered them to voice their worries, reinforcing the feeling of being stuck in a roller coaster. Adolescents were convinced of their own responsibility, amplified by living in an unsafe home with unavailable caretakers. All these took place in a broader societal context of COVID-19 lockdowns, social media influences, and school. Taking adolescents' experiences as our reference point, meaningful networks for depressed youth should (a) cover more than (transdiagnostic) symptoms; (b) include identity questions, sensitive to development; and (c) centralize context and interpersonal dynamics. Qualitative research and mixed-methods research prove to be powerful means to validate the meaningfulness of idiographic assessment aimed at providing personalized care.