Home

Dynamic Eclectic Existential Psychopharmacotherapy (DEEP Therapy)

a core method for

Rights-based Existential Psychiatry

About me

A transdiagnostic, eclectic and patient-centred approach

Incorporating Acceptance, Behavioural change, Cognitive restructuring, Dynamic analysis, Existential exploration, Focused pharmacotherapy, and Grounding techniques

MEDICAL ADVICE DISCLAIMER: 
This website is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical, psychiatric, or psychological advice. The content is not a substitute for professional diagnosis, treatment, or clinical care. Always seek the advice of a qualified mental health professional regarding any condition or treatment. Do not disregard or delay professional care because of information on this website.
The content is provided without warranties, and no liability is accepted for errors, omissions, or outcomes arising from its use. The views expressed are my own and do not represent those of any affiliated institutions or organisations.

Rights-based Existential Psychiatry

Human rights-based approaches and existential philosophy share important common ground. Both centre the human person rather than the disorder, and both emphasise dignity, agency, responsibility, and relationality. Integrating these traditions into Rights-Based Existential Psychiatry creates a comprehensive and ethically grounded framework for understanding and treating mental health conditions.

Rights-based Existential Psychiatry does not reject existing psychiatric knowledge or established schools of thought. Rather, it proposes a reorientation, one that restores depth, dignity, and agency to mental health care while maintaining scientific integrity and evidence-informed practice. At its core, it combines the ethical imperatives of human rights-based care (autonomy, non-coercion, participation, and equity) with the existential understanding of psychological suffering as a confrontation with the fundamental conditions of human existence. The result is a model that is clinically responsible, philosophically coherent, and morally grounded.

 

Human rights-based Psychiatry:

Human rights-based psychiatry is an approach to mental health care grounded in the principles of international human rights law. It recognises that individuals with mental health conditions possess the same inherent rights as all human beings, and that these rights must be respected, protected, and fulfilled throughout every aspect of care.

This approach emphasises dignity, autonomy, non-discrimination, and meaningful participation. Individuals have the right to make informed decisions about their treatment, to be free from unnecessary coercion or forced interventions, and to be actively involved in care planning. It also affirms rights to privacy, confidentiality, and access to clear and comprehensible information.

Human rights-based psychiatry further promotes treatment in the least restrictive environment possible, favouring community-based and recovery-oriented supports over institutionalisation whenever feasible. Collaboration among clinicians, patients, families, and communities is central. The goal is not only symptom reduction, but empowerment, respect for lived experience, and restoration of social inclusion.

Ultimately, human rights-based psychiatry seeks to create a mental health system that upholds dignity, strengthens agency, and fosters recovery within a framework of justice and accountability.

 

Existential Psychiatry:

Existential psychiatry draws on existential philosophy to deepen our understanding of psychological suffering. Existential philosophy explores questions of meaning, freedom, responsibility, mortality, authenticity, and the nature of human existence. Existential psychiatry applies these principles to clinical practice, emphasising subjective experience and the individual’s search for meaning within the realities of life.

  • Death: Death is not viewed merely as a biological event, but as an existential reality that shapes human consciousness. Awareness of mortality can provoke anxiety, yet it can also stimulate reflection on meaning, purpose, and authenticity. Existential psychotherapy invites individuals to confront finitude rather than avoid it, fostering a deeper appreciation of time and a more intentional engagement with life.
  • Freedom, Choice and Responsibility: Human beings are not infinitely powerful, but they are continually required to choose. Existential psychiatry explores how individuals exercise agency within constraints and how they assume responsibility for their responses to circumstances, including suffering. Therapy supports patients in moving from passivity or victimhood toward authorship of their lives.
  • Meaning and Purpose: Mental distress is often intertwined with crises of meaning. Existential psychiatry recognises that suffering may reflect disconnection from values, purpose, or identity. Therapy, therefore, helps individuals discover, clarify, or create meaning, even amid adversity.
  • Isolation and Connection: Existential thought acknowledges the tension between our fundamental separateness and our deep need for connection. Loneliness, alienation, and relational rupture are understood not only as social phenomena but as existential realities. Therapy addresses both the pain of isolation and the courage required for genuine connection.
  • Authenticity: Authenticity involves living in alignment with one’s values and inner truth rather than conforming to external pressures or internalised expectations. Existential psychiatry supports individuals in recognising inauthentic patterns and cultivating lives that are congruent with their deeper commitments.
  • Existential Angst

    Existential Angst

    Existential anxiety arises from awareness of uncertainty, mortality, freedom, and responsibility. Rather than pathologising this anxiety, existential psychiatry explores how individuals respond to it, whether through avoidance, rigidity, despair, or growth.

    Overall, existential psychiatry provides a framework for understanding mental health struggles within the broader context of the human condition, encouraging reflection, courage, and meaning-oriented living.

Overall, existential psychiatry is a framework for understanding and approaching mental health issues, incorporating existential principles, to help individuals explore and navigate their existential concerns and to encourage a holistic understanding of individuals and their mental health struggles within the broader context of their existential experience.

 

The Integration: From Parallel Traditions to Rights-based Existential Psychiatry

Rights-based and existential psychiatry converge in a shared conviction: that mental health care must treat persons, not merely symptoms. Human rights-based psychiatry provides the ethical structure, a commitment to dignity, autonomy, non-coercion, and participatory care. Existential psychiatry provides the philosophical depth, an understanding of suffering as rooted not only in biology or circumstance, but in the challenges of being human. Rights-based Existential Psychiatry unites these dimensions. Where human rights guard against objectification, existential thought guards against reductionism. Where rights emphasise external protections, existential philosophy illuminates internal responsibility.
Where rights insist on participation, existentialism insists on authorship. Together, they create a model in which the patient is neither a passive recipient of treatment nor solely a bearer of pathology, but a meaning-seeking, choice-making, relational human being whose rights and existential struggles are equally respected. Rights-Based Existential Psychiatry, therefore, seeks to humanise psychiatric care at both structural and clinical levels. It affirms scientific knowledge while resisting dehumanisation. It protects autonomy while inviting responsibility. It validates suffering while encouraging growth. In Rights-based Existential Psychiatry, dignity is not an abstract principle, and meaning is not a luxury; both are central to healing.

Dynamic Eclectic Existential Psychopharmacotherapy (DEEP Therapy)

Dynamic Eclectic Existential Psychopharmacotherapy (DEEP Therapy) is the clinical application of Rights-Based Existential Psychiatry. It is an integrative therapeutic model that combines evidence-based psychotherapeutic techniques, existential exploration, psychodynamic insight, behavioural science, and responsible pharmacotherapy within a unified, human-centred framework. DEEP Therapy does not represent a new school competing with existing modalities. Rather, it is a structured, principled integration of them. It draws from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, psychodynamic and Jungian traditions, existential psychotherapy, trauma-informed care, mindfulness-based approaches, and contemporary psychiatric practice. Its distinguishing feature is not the techniques themselves, but the philosophical and ethical lens through which they are applied. DEEP Therapy recognises that psychological suffering is rarely reducible to neurochemistry alone. Symptoms are often embedded in biography, trauma, relational patterns, existential dilemmas, and social context. Therefore, treatment must be multidimensional, flexible, and collaborative.

At its core, DEEP Therapy seeks to restore:

  • Agency rather than passivity

  • Meaning rather than mere symptom reduction

  • Dialogue rather than authority

  • Integration rather than fragmentation

 

The Seven Modules of DEEP Therapy

DEEP Therapy is organised into seven interconnected components. These are not rigid stages but flexible domains that can be emphasised depending on clinical need.

Acceptance: Acceptance establishes psychological flexibility and present-moment awareness. Rooted in mindfulness-based and third-wave cognitive therapies, it helps patients relate differently to distressing thoughts, emotions, and sensations. Acceptance in DEEP is active and intentional, not resignation. It reduces secondary suffering and prepares the ground for deeper therapeutic work.

Behavioural change: Behavioural interventions focus on identifying and gradually modifying maladaptive patterns while aligning action with personal values. Behavioural change in DEEP is collaborative and meaning-oriented, not prescriptive. It supports movement from avoidance toward engagement with life.

Cognitive restructuring: Cognitive work explores and revises unhelpful belief systems and automatic thoughts. In DEEP, cognitive restructuring goes beyond correcting distortions; it investigates how beliefs are embedded in life narrative, trauma history, and existential worldview. The aim is clarity, coherence, and perspective, not forced positivity.

Dynamic analysis: Dynamic analysis introduces psychodynamic depth. It explores unconscious processes, defence mechanisms, attachment patterns, transference, and early relational experiences. Insight into developmental and relational patterns enables integration rather than repetition of past conflicts.

Existential exploration: Existential exploration addresses fundamental human concerns: mortality, freedom, responsibility, isolation, authenticity, and meaning. This module invites patients to confront life’s unavoidable realities and to assume authorship of their choices. It moves therapy from symptom management to existential growth.

Focused pharmacotherapy: Focused pharmacotherapy is the careful, evidence-informed use of medication within a broader humanistic plan. Medication is neither central nor rejected. It is used collaboratively, with informed consent, to facilitate engagement in deeper psychological work while minimising overmedicalisation and polypharmacy.

Grounding techniques: Grounding techniques provide stabilisation and safety throughout therapy. These practices help patients remain anchored in the present during emotional overwhelm, trauma activation, or crisis. Grounding enhances regulation and enables safe access to deeper therapeutic processes.

 

Why “Dynamic,” “Eclectic,” and “Existential”?

Dynamic reflects the inclusion of psychodynamic understanding and the recognition that the psyche is shaped by unconscious processes and developmental history.

Eclectic refers to the thoughtful integration of diverse evidence-based approaches rather than allegiance to a single theoretical school.

Existential signifies the centrality of meaning, responsibility, freedom, mortality, and authenticity in understanding human distress.

Psychopharmacotherapy acknowledges that medication can play a legitimate but carefully bounded role within an integrated treatment plan.

 

The Integration

DEEP Therapy embodies the ethical commitments of REP in daily clinical practice. It ensures that techniques serve the person, not the other way around. It treats symptoms while exploring their meaning. It respects autonomy while encouraging responsibility. It integrates science without losing philosophical depth. In DEEP Therapy, the clinician is not merely an expert applying protocols, but a trained professional entering into a collaborative, respectful dialogue with another human being. The patient is not a passive recipient of treatment, but an active co-author in the process of healing. The goal is not simply to reduce symptoms, but to cultivate a life that is coherent, authentic, and meaningful.

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate"

Carl Jung