 The medical model is widely believed to borrow the “common cause” structure of general medicine, in which observed variables (symptoms) indicate the existence of a latent variable that is their cause. The network model (Nuijten et al 2016), however, makes a very different bet. Rather than an underlying cause or latent variable, it attributes the joint occurrence and course of the clustered symptoms to the fact that they are part of the same network: “instead of being effects of a common cause, psychiatric symptoms have been argued to cause each other” (Borsboom 2017, p.5). This can be represented as a network  in which symptoms are nodes, and the connections between nodes indicate causal relations, which we can understand using interventionist models of causation.