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. It was developed as the clinical foundation for the Cathexis digital therapeutics platform but is presented here as a standalone clinical framework. 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. Version 2.1 grounds the manual in the now-published Human Experience System and reframes its treatment of established therapeutic modalities — cognitive, behavioral, and psychodynamic approaches — as complementary rather than comparative: the HEF is designed to work alongside existing care, on the somatic and predictive layer, extending that work between sessions. An expanded edition, Human Experience Framework v3.0, is in preparation.
Justin DeGarbo (Fri,) studied this question.