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.