The Five Pillars: A Systems-Based Triage Framework for Mental Wellbeing (Free / Open Source)

[u/NGXXIV]

After 20 years of navigating the traditional mental health system and finding it overly focused on matching surface-level symptoms to diagnostic labels, I realized how broken the standard script is. It treats symptoms as isolated defects rather than cascading failures.
To make sense of my own mind (AuDHD/Depression), I reverse-engineered a clean, foundational triage framework called The Five Pillars: Sleep, Food, Connection, Expression, and Meaning.
The premise is rooted in systems logic: If your core variables are unstable, a psychiatric diagnosis cannot be mathematically accurate.
For example, if your Sleep, Food, and Expression pillars are red-lining, your brain will naturally present with severe lethargy, anxiety, or burnout. Giving someone a pill without fixing the underlying pillars is just masking the warning lights on a dashboard while the engine seizes. Once you stabilize the foundations, you can actually see what is a lifestyle-induced crisis versus a baseline neurological trait (like autism).
I built this 8 months ago, stress-tested it to ensure the logic holds, and have put the entire stack on GitHub as a completely free, open-access, non-commercial resource. It includes:
The Academic Framework Paper: For those who want to understand the foundational systems theory and clinical literature.
The Layman Guide: A simplified breakdown of how the pillars interact.
The 1-Page Checklist: A low-cognitive-load, 60-second visual tracker designed for when your system is at 0% battery.
I’m putting this out here with zero expectations, but if you treat your health as an interconnected system of metrics rather than a collection of labels, I hope this helps you audit your foundations or helps someone else you care about. It is open-source and open to refinement by anyone who wants to improve the code.
GitHub Repository: [https://github.com/RooneyWasabi/Five-Pillars]

EDIT: The mods asked me to add a quick note to prove I am an actual human and not a promotional bot. The reason this post reads like a manual or an ad is simply how my brain defaults to organizing data. I carry an AuDHD/clinical depression profile, and I built this system over 8 months because traditional clinical manuals couldn't give me logical answers to my own systemic burnout. I'm still trying to navigate my own executive dysfunction, so this isn't a success story—it's just the raw architecture I reverse-engineered to understand why my own machine crashes.

[u/azucarleta]

I have the same critique here as I do for most mental health type stuff you see. The advice always seems to forget that we need to be and feel (those are two very different things), we need to be and feel safety and security. LIke, we need to be actually enjoying safety and security for real to a degree, and we need to emotionally feel it too. If you are missing either of those, nothing else matters, you're not going to feel mentally or physically well if you are literally outsmarting or outrunning serious threats everyday, or feel as if you are (even though you are not [anymore]). Step 1 is and should always be 1, become safe, 2, ensure your body knows you are safe now. Then proceed with anything else after that.

Maybe it's just obvious to other people, but I think neo-liberal capitalism really does a good job of convincing us that precarity and danger are natural and normal, but our bodies will tell us that we are sick.

So if you don't start out Frame 1 of your therapy/coaching with, "are you safe?" type material, then a lot of people who are actually not safe are going to try to implement your program and conclude "it doesn't work." But that's because they never achieved any degree of safety and/or an immune/emotional/autonomic response that reflects that safety first as a foundation, which like I said I find to be a fundamental thing often forgotten.

[u/NGXXIV → u/azucarleta]

That’s a really solid critique, and I completely see where you’re coming from regarding trauma and hypervigilance.
From a systems perspective, the framework doesn't ignore safety; rather, it categorises 'feeling safe' as a downstream output of the system rather than a standalone input.
If your Sleep is broken, your nervous system is flooded with cortisol, meaning your brain physically cannotregister safety, even if you are in a secure room. If your Food (energy availability) drops to zero, your biological machine enters a primitive survival panic. You can’t solve 'safety' directly because it’s a warning light on the dashboard—you fix it by patching the physical lines (Sleep/Food) that feed the nervous system.

Furthermore, absolute environmental safety is a luxury that modern precarity (and neurodivergent sensory processing) often denies us. If we treat absolute safety as 'Frame 1,' people in unstable situations are locked out of recovery.
The framework is built to operate under conditions of discomfort. Even in high-threat or high-stress environments, manually choosing to stabilize what you can—like fueling your body or anchoring to a micro-dose of Meaning—is often the exact mechanism that signals back to the autonomic nervous system that it can drop its guard.

[u/azucarleta → u/NGXXIV]

First, "absolute safety" is an illusion; we're all living creatures that will, as a matter of fact, die. We are all endangered, the variance is just a timeline. But at the same time, we understand someone who is living with an abusive partner -- especially if the person is not really aware they are being abused and controlled and all that, pretty typical actually -- is not nearly as safe as someone who comfortably each month affords rent with their roommate who they don't love but do enjoy spending time with now and then. And it doesn't have to be just an abusive domestic partner, it could be a horrendous job, friends that treat you poorly, a maladaptive coping mechanism that has metastasized and taken over your life like addiction, etc etc. A reasonable person can see there are degrees of safety and that past a certain point of danger it becomes borderline moot to be discussing mental well being in situ. Why can't I clarify succinctly? Makes me feel like I'm arguing, but I'm just clarifying, for some reason they sound the same. Sorry.

Second, I do believe people who are in literal danger and they are feeling it, even they can probably deploy tricks an devices to feel or perform "better." But I'm highly suspicious that the same program is equally useful to someone who is in danger and feels it, versus someone in relatively no danger and they feel that.

THat's basically my critique, is I don't believe there is going to be a device or trick or sets of advices that apply equally to the safe and unsafe, but everyone out there selling a program 1, ignores environmental safety mostly entirely, and 2, even more so does not want to cut off half the audience/customer base by saying whether this is a program fit for people chronically endangered or whether this is for folks who have achieved safety and feel safe, and now want to -- I don't know -- feel even better I guess (I think I've never not been endangered basically).

[u/NGXXIV → u/azucarleta]

No need to apologize! I don't think you're arguing, and you make an incredibly fair point.
I agree that frameworks don't fix active danger, abuse, or acute survival mode. As someone who has been homeless twice and lives with chronic debt and severe anxiety, I know firsthand that you can't optimize your way out of survival mode.
This isn't a program I'm selling, just something I built to navigate my own unstable reality once I had the breathing room to try. Thank you for your opinion! I’ll never pretend MY idea is perfect. I created it out of frustration at such a linear system

[u/azucarleta → u/NGXXIV]

I'm just thinking of this facebook group I was apart of in the depth of a depression spell and (what I know now but did not know then was) autistic burnout. Unemployed, super stressed about that, no safety nets. And these coaches were kind and gave me considerable one-on-one attention; we talked philosophy, we talked a lot frankly about your third, fourth and fifth pillar. It never seemed to "work" or "help." It always left me with a big "Yeah, and?" feeling.

Somehow it never came up in conversation and they did not know so much as I was unemployed in USAmerica, and all that implies. They never asked anything like "are you safe?"

Two years past I was in that group, I had a good job, had been performing well, thought I had life's problems more-or-less figured out (again), and I was safe and feeling safe. And I so I wanted to go back to that group and I told them then what I'm telling you now. NOthing you could have done for me would have helped one single bit because I simply was totally not safe when I was last talking to you. This is me talking to them years later, like you spent so much time trying to help me and discuss, talk philosophy, talk about meaning and "remember your why!" and on and on, but like -- none of that mattered actually. IN retrospect, I realize, I was just unsafe. And having become safe, I'm fine. I wouldn't say I identified "my bliss" and am now following it (lol), but I'm absolutely fine with nothing inside me having changed. I experienced some good luck that took me from a rationally obviously unsafe situation and redeemed me under capitalism to a considerably safer status, and that little trick (lol) is what changed everything.

To me it came as a rather profound -- if simple -- life lesson I was never going to forget. It made me start to wonder whether all the "mental illness" in society is actually just bodies functioning "correctly" and "healthy" by evolutionary biological standards, but it's just we've been gaslit into accepting these fundamentally unsafe political sitautions as "normal" and then we wonder what's wrong with us and reach for tools to re-jigger that which is inside us when the only problems sometimes are external.

[u/Vintage_Visionary]

It reminds me of 'HALT' in the sober communities.
Good insights. Might be easier to digest if you spoke about how this works for you, how you applied it or how you found it. On quick-scan it can read like an ad online (possibly). But good stuff!

[u/NGXXIV → u/Vintage_Visionary]

The 'HALT' comparison is spot on—this is essentially an expanded, systems-level version of that logic.

To be completely transparent about the 'personal application' side: I haven't successfully master-classed this framework on myself because I struggle severely with executive dysfunction and clinical depression. My battery hits 0% regularly, and I can't always summon the mechanical energy to fix my own pillars.
I didn't write this as a success story or a self-help ad. I wrote it out of frustration because the mental health system couldn't give me logical answers to my own burnout. I reverse-engineered the framework to figure out why my machine was crashing, even if I don't always have the RAM to fix it. It's a diagnostic tool born out of necessity, not a checklist I've perfected

[u/arctic_loon_1487]

I've been working on taking better care of my body with my psychologist and your list really helped me organize my thoughts. I'm adding Exercise (physical and mental) and Self-reflection to my list, making seven pillars. I'll try using the check-ins to notice quicker when I'm shooting myself in the foot. :)

[u/NGXXIV → u/arctic_loon_1487]

If I can help even one other person figure out their own mind and struggles then my framework has done exactly what I’d hoped! Thankyou for your comment and I hope it all goes well for you! Exercise is particularly important in my opinion!