The Human Experience Framework: Clinical Manual (Version 3.0)

Abstract

This manual presents the Human Experience Framework (HEF), a neuroscience-grounded classification system for understanding human psychological suffering through the lens of predictive processing, primary affect systems, distributed functional brain networks, and somatic experience. The HEF is the clinical classification layer of the Human Experience System (HES; DeGarbo, 2026), the transdisciplinary theory it operationalizes. The framework addresses a documented limitation of existing classification systems: the DSM-5-TR and ICD-11 organize suffering by symptom clusters derived from committee consensus, producing categories with limited neurobiological validity. The HEF organizes experience by the underlying neurobiological patterns that generate suffering — how a person's nervous system is currently organized, and what that organization feels like from the inside. It is designed to work alongside existing care rather than in place of it. Version 3.0 is the complete clinical reference and supersedes all earlier editions. It comprises twenty-nine chapters across three parts: the theoretical and neurobiological foundation, the assessment architecture, the therapeutic model, the developmental account, and the prevention model (Part I); full clinical chapters for each of the sixteen territories, each treated across eighteen sections covering felt experience, predictive architecture, affect-system landscape, neural organization, formation, differential diagnosis, presentation variations, epidemiology, evidence base, and the framework's own acknowledged limits (Part II); and the clinical integration guide, safety and risk architecture, digital implementation, the psychosis and mania boundary, regulatory positioning, and limitations and future research (Part III). Seventeen figures, three appendices, and a subject index are included. Three features distinguish this edition. The safety and risk architecture (Chapter 25) presents a four-mechanism model of suicidal convergence — motivation, FEAR attenuation, disinhibition, and isolation — with territory-specific risk configurations, including presentations that standard screening instruments systematically miss. The boundary chapter (Chapter 27) states plainly why acute psychosis and acute mania sit outside the territory model, and why the framework's interoceptive methodology is contraindicated in those states. The limitations chapter (Chapter 29) sets out what is empirically established against what is theoretically grounded and awaiting prospective validation, including the single-author limitation and a staged validation program. Quantitative thresholds, recovery markers, and measurement parameters throughout are presented as design specifications and empirical placeholders by intent, to be calibrated against data. They are explicitly not validated psychometric norms. The framework is published free of charge under CC BY 4.0 and will remain so. A classification system is worth what its adoption is worth: one that cannot be freely read, taught, tested, cited and extended is not a framework. The clinical training that teaches its application is available separately at https://cathexis.health/science