Importance In recent years, there has been increased focus on subthreshold stages of
mental disorders, with attempts to model and predict which individuals will progress to full-
threshold disorder. Given this research attention and the clinical significance of the issue,
this article analyzes the assumptions of the theoretical models in the field. Observations
Psychiatric research into predicting the onset of mental disorder has shown an overreliance
on one-off sampling of cross-sectional data (ie, a snapshot of clinical state and other risk …