A Five-Domain Architectural Framework for Psychological Pathology Structural Integrity, Recursive Regulation, and Clinical Sequencing

Contemporary models of mental illness primarily organize psychopathology through symptom clusters and diagnostic categories. Although these systems provide shared clinical language and reliability, they insufficiently represent the structural and dynamic organization of psychological functioning observed in clinical practice. Presentations rarely consist of isolated symptoms; instead, they reflect coordinated configurations of regulation, identity, relational functioning, and biological capacity unfolding across time. This paper introduces a five-domain architectural framework that conceptualizes psychopathology as person-level organization under constraint rather than as a collection of independent deficits. Pathology is described across five interdependent functional domains: (I) structural integrity, (II) regulation and threat processing, (III) identity organization, (IV) relational functioning, and (V) biological constraints. Two global overlays—temporal dynamics and risk–safety gating—govern interaction strength, reversibility, and intervention accessibility. The framework complements diagnostic and transdiagnostic models by supporting formulation, prioritization, and clinical sequencing. Claims are architectural and heuristic rather than causal, normative, or universal. Permissions NoticeThis work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Any use involving adaptation, modification, translation, educational deployment, therapeutic application, derivative modeling, or inclusion in external platforms beyond unchanged archival hosting requires explicit written permission from the author.