# Computational Psychiatry **Domain:** Psychiatry / Computational Modeling / Neuroscience **Function:** Uses formal models of cognition, learning, inference, and decision-making to describe mechanisms that may produce psychiatric symptoms. Computational psychiatry treats behavior and mental distress as phenomena that can be studied through explicit models rather than through description alone. Its models may estimate latent states such as uncertainty, reward sensitivity, learning rate, belief updating, or confidence from observed behavior and physiological data. The field is most useful when it improves explanation, measurement, or treatment while remaining answerable to the person whose mind is being modeled. A model can organize evidence without becoming a verdict. Statistical fit does not establish a person's identity, moral character, dangerousness, or future conduct. ## Clinical and governance boundary In clinical practice, computational models can support hypothesis formation, treatment selection, and longitudinal monitoring. In administrative systems, the same techniques can drift toward [[wiki/Predictive Psychiatry|Predictive Psychiatry]]: classification becomes prediction, prediction becomes intervention, and intervention becomes a means of enforcing behavioral conformity. [[wiki/Westworld S3E6 — The Model Beneath the Model|Westworld S3E6]] stages that danger by placing William inside a therapeutic environment that is simultaneously diagnostic, narrative, and coercive. The scene asks who may construct a model of a patient, write into the patient's autobiographical field, and decide that the resulting model is authoritative. ## Related [[wiki/Digital Phenotyping|Digital Phenotyping]] · [[wiki/Closed-Loop Neuromodulation|Closed-Loop Neuromodulation]] · [[wiki/Neuroadaptive Governance|Neuroadaptive Governance]] · [[wiki/Model-Subject Boundary|Model-Subject Boundary]] · [[wiki/Prediction Is Not Jurisdiction|Prediction Is Not Jurisdiction]]