My research lies at the intersection of clinical psychology, developmental psychopathology, and quantitative methodology, with a particular emphasis on understanding mental health as a dynamic and individualized process. I study how psychological symptoms and processes interact over time and across contexts, and why certain individuals are at heightened risk for severe outcomes, such as suicidal thoughts and behaviors. A unifying theme across my work is the use of network-based and other modeling approaches to move beyond static descriptions of psychopathology toward dynamic and personalized mental health interventions.
Suicidal Thinking and Self-Injurious Behavours
A central line of my research focuses on suicidality, self-injury, and acute risk states, with the goal of identifying actionable psychological mechanisms that can inform prevention and intervention.
In several projects, I have examined how cognitive, affective, and interpersonal risk factors jointly contribute to suicidal ideation, rather than acting in isolation. Using network and machine-learning approaches, this work highlights heterogeneity in suicide risk pathways and shows that different constellations of symptoms can lead to similar levels of risk (e.g., Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 2023; Nature Mental Health, 2025).
Complementing this clinical focus, I have studied temporal and contextual patterns of suicidality, such as seasonal, weekly, and hourly fluctuations in suicidal thoughts and implicit cognitions (Translational Psychiatry, 2023). Together, these studies argue for suicide prevention strategies that are dynamic, individualized, and mechanism-focused.
Selected Publications:
Freichel, R., O’Shea, B. A. (2023). Suicidality and mood: the impact of trends, seasons, day of the week, and time of day on explicit and implicit cognitions among an online community sample. Translational Psychiatry, 13(1), 157. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-023-02434-1
Freichel, R., Nock, M. K., O’Shea, B. A. (2025). A network outcome analysis of psychological risk factors driving suicide risk in emergency department patients. Nature Mental Health, 3(3), 346–353. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-025-00389-4
Freichel, R., Wiers, R., O’Shea, B., McNally, R. J., de Beurs, D. (2023). Between the group and the individual: The need for within-person panel study approaches in suicide research. Psychiatry Research, 330, 115549. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2023.115549
Personalized Psychotherapy and Mental Health
A second line of my research focuses on developing and applying network-based and other longitudinal models to advance personalized mental health research. Rather than treating psychopathology as a uniform latent construct, this work conceptualizes mental disorders as dynamic systems of interacting symptoms and psychological processes that unfold over time, developmental stages, and contexts.
I have contributed to both methodological and applied research using panel network models, which enable the disentanglement of temporal symptom relations while accounting for stable between-person differences. This work supports the idea that symptoms often engage in reciprocal, self-reinforcing dynamics, providing a mechanistic basis for personalized intervention strategies that target key symptoms or processes within an individual’s network.
I have been involved in methodological advances in network psychometrics, including work on confirmatory network modeling and the evaluation of model fit indices (Psychological Methods, 2025), as well as tutorials and overviews aimed at improving transparency and robustness in applied network research.
Selected publications:
Freichel, R. (2025). Network-informed interventions for psychopathology: Psychotherapy research. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1-1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-025-00513-2
Freichel, R., Lenartowicz, A., Douw, L., Kruschwitz, J. D., …, Blanken, T. F. (2024). Unraveling robust brain-behavior links of depressive symptoms through granular network models for understanding heterogeneity. Journal of Affective Disorders, 359, 140-144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2024.05.060
Transdiagnostic Processes
Across diagnostic categories, my research focuses on transdiagnostic processes and dynamics that cut across traditional disorder boundaries and help explain why diverse symptom profiles often co-occur and persist over time. In particular, I study mechanisms related to affect regulation, executive functioning, and maladaptive coping, examining how these processes interact dynamically with emotional and behavioral symptoms. Rather than treating such mechanisms as static traits, my work conceptualizes them as time-varying components, whose influence may differ across individuals, developmental stages, and contexts. By modeling these processes alongside clinical symptoms using network, longitudinal, and experimental approaches, this line of research aims to identify shared and potentially modifiable targets that may inform more personalized and flexible intervention strategies across a broad range of mental health conditions.
Selected publications:
Freichel, R., Skjerdingstad, N., Mansueto, A. C., Epskamp, S., Hoffart, A., Johnson, S. U., Ebrahimi, O. V. (2023). Use of substances to cope predicts PTSD symptom persistence: Investigating patterns of interactions between complex PTSD symptoms and its maintaining mechanisms. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 17(1), 216–224. https://doi.org/10.1037/tra0001624
Freichel, R., Epskamp, S., de Jong, P. J., Cousijn, J., Franken, I., Salum, G. A., Pan, P. M., Veer, I. M., Wiers, R. W. (2025). Investigating risk factor and consequence accounts of executive functioning impairments in psychopathology: An 8-year study of at-risk individuals in Brazil. Psychological Medicine, 55, e192. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291725100639
René Freichel 