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Most people with one mental health diagnosis also qualify for several others, even if they aren't all named.

Personality traits like neuroticism are shared risk factors underneath many separate diagnoses.

Targeting traits can produce broad symptom change in less time than treating each diagnosis separately.

Most of the people I work with inside my therapy practice have more than one mental health diagnosis. And this is not something specific to my clients; 75 percent of people with an anxiety disorder will also meet criteria for clinical depression at some point in their lives.

Take my client, Kay, for example. During our first session, I asked her about the symptoms she'd been experiencing and learned that she struggled with social anxiety disorder (SAD), bulimia nervosa (BN), and borderline personality disorder (BPD).

Despite the fact that most people show symptoms of more than one condition, most proven treatments have been developed and tested for a single diagnosis. That means the traditional way of helping someone like Kay would be to create a treatment plan that daisy-chained the separate therapy protocols for each individual disorder.

We might start with six months of dialectical behavior therapy to address her BPD, followed by another three months of........

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