Abstract
This article responds to the 2026 SUN RISE report on how “subjective experience” should be included in mental health research. It argues that the study identifies a real and urgent problem, but remains constrained by the subjective/objective binary it seeks to challenge. Using Living Value Theory, the article reframes “subjective experience” as felt misalignment: a pre-symbolic disruption in living coordination that only later becomes available as symbolic articulation and binary classification. Because this disturbance is multi-mediated across embodiment, being-with, dwelling, multimateriality, and multisymbolism, it cannot be scaled without being transmuted. The article proposes recursive fluidity as a replacement framework for understanding mental health: health is the capacity to move through misalignment and return to seamless coordination, while mental illness is recursive rigidity. This reframing shifts mental health research from capturing subjective reports to tracing the conditions that disrupt or restore living coordination.
1. A Study that Knows Something Is Wrong
The SUN RISE study, commissioned by Wellcome and conducted by the McPin Foundation in collaboration with the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University, is a brilliant piece of research (https://mcpin.org/resource/sunrise-summary-report/). It does not simply advocate for a methodological add-on to existing mental health science. It diagnoses something structurally wrong. Over five research work packages, involving 336 participants from diverse regions and disciplines, it concludes that 'subjective experience is not an optional extra. It is central to making science that is valid, ethical, and impactful.' The further claim is even stronger: 'Learning from the subjective is possibly the only way to better support people who experience mental health issues with improved interventions and care in the future.' The authors rightly say that most mental health research has been missing something fundamental, not something supplementary, not something nice-to-have, but something whose absence makes the science invalid by its own standards. The SUN RISE team knows that something is wrong, but it’s not that subjective experience has not been ‘included’ enough.
'Subjective experience' may be the best available term within the biomedical frameworks of mental health research, but it is so riddled with problems that, to my mind, it can never be rescued. This article proposes a complete replacement: recursive fluidity. This is not a terminological nicety but an altogether different ontology. What mental health is, what mental illness disrupts, and therefore what mental health research should be trying to understand, cannot be described within subjective/objective binaries. The empirical insights of the SUN RISE study keep standing within this different ontology, arguably they make a lot more sense once the subjective/objective framing is thrown out.
2. The Concept That Names the Problem and Reproduces It
The SUN RISE authors are fully aware that the phrase 'subjective experience' carries heavy conceptual baggage. Their report notes that 'there was a consistent thread raised in the data: whether describing this body of work as "subjective" positioned it in opposition to "objective"', and that 'a risk that this may reinforce existing methodological and disciplinary silos, including undervaluing this form of knowledge creation.' This is a precise observation. The concept of subjective experience is not neutral. It arrives pre-loaded with a binary that the SUN RISE study is trying to dismantle.
In terms of Living Value Theory, ‘subjective experience’ is one pole of an Enlightenment SWIPE: a split world with incommensurably paired epistemologies (). ‘Subjective’ experience demands hermeneutic verstehen, not explanation and deductive modelling. The binary is the Enlightenment partition between the subjective and the objective, between the inner world of feeling, interpretation, and experience and the outer world of measurable, replicable fact. This partition is not merely a convention that researchers have adopted and can simply abandon. It is architecturally embedded in the institutional structures of mental health research: in evidence hierarchies that rank randomised controlled trials above qualitative studies, in funding structures that reward biomarker research over narrative inquiry, in publication systems that treat first-person accounts as illustration rather than evidence. When SUN RISE calls for greater engagement with 'subjective experience,' it is working against this architecture while using a concept that belongs to it.
The evidence of conceptual strain is implicit and explicit throughout the report. The team found that 'there remained many different views about this term, and few people found the phrase "subjective experiences research" useful to increase engagement with or further the types of work described in our key themes.' The concept that the study uses to name its object is the same concept that makes the object difficult to defend. This is not incidental. It is the signature of a conceptual problem: a term that points toward something real while simultaneously reinstating the framework that marginalises what it is pointing at.
What is being pointed at, and what the term 'subjective experience' fails to adequately name, is best approached through the empirical materials the study generates. Consider the finding that 'this work is context specific and does not easily translate to different places, topics and times: a study exploring the subjective experience of psychosis in the UK does not tell us about the experience of psychosis in Africa or what an effective intervention for people here looks like.' This finding is typically treated as a limitation, an obstacle to generalisation that better methods might overcome. The alternative reading, which this article pursues, is that context-specificity is not a feature of how we study the phenomenon but of what the phenomenon is. Mental health and mental illness are not properties of individual minds that vary across cultural contexts. They are configurations of living coordination that are constitutively shaped by the specific bodies, relationships, environments, materials, and symbolic systems through which that coordination takes place. The finding does not tell us that our methods need improving. It tells us that our ontology needs replacing.
3. Five Mediations: What Mental Health Actually Involves
Living Value Theory begins from the concept of the mesocosm: the lived field in which coordination actually takes place. The mesocosm is not a scale of analysis, not a synonym for context, and not a middle ground between micro and macro. It is the field in which living beings and their worlds are co-constituted through ongoing processes of coordination. Nothing enters the mesocosm without being mediated into coordination; conversely, what is not mediated into coordination does not enter the mesocosm at all, regardless of its physical presence. LVT begins from coordination itself, not from the individual who coordinates and not from the environment within which coordination occurs. The distinction matters: a framework centred on the individual, however sophisticated, will always be tempted to locate mental health inside the person. A framework centred on coordination locates it in the field.
Coordination in the mesocosm takes place through five irreducible mediations. Embodiment names the coordination that occurs through and as the lived body: sensation, proprioception, interoception, metabolism, fatigue, pain, pleasure, arousal, skill, rhythm, and the temporal structures of biological life. Embodiment is not the body as biological object; it is the body as the ongoing condition of access to everything else. Being-with names coordination with other living beings: co-presence, attunement, care, dependency, recognition, conflict, shame, intimacy, and the recursive character of relations in which each party responds to the other's responding. Dwelling names the non-human environmental conditions within which coordination unfolds: climate, terrain, light cycles, seasonal rhythms, ecological regularities, and the spatial and temporal affordances that living beings did not produce and cannot redesign at will. Multimateriality names coordination through the full range of humanly produced materials and artefacts: tools, medicines, food, clothing, built environments, technologies, infrastructures, and the material arrangements of daily life. Multisymbolism names coordination through symbolic systems: language, number, diagnostic categories, clinical narratives, institutional classifications, public discourse about mental illness, and all other systems through which coordination is articulated, legitimised, and contested.
These five mediations are not dimensions of experience and they are not variables to be measured separately and combined. They are always simultaneously present and mutually conditioning in any actual situation. The sleep cycle, relational rhythms, environmental affordances, material conditions, and symbolic anticipations are never truly separable in the life of a person with depression. They have reorganised into a single rigid coordinative configuration in which each element compounds the others. What happens in one mediation continuously reshapes what is possible in the others, and the disruption is constituted by that mutual compounding, not by any single element within it.
This is what the SUN RISE study's commitment to an 'intersectional and holistic approach' is reaching for, without quite arriving at it. 'Holistic' and 'intersectional' are the right instincts. But they describe a methodological disposition rather than an ontological claim. LVT makes the stronger claim: mental health is not a state of any single mediation or any combination of mediations. It is a property of the whole coordinative field. What the mediational framework provides that 'holistic' does not is a grammar: a precise account of what dimensions are always involved and why no reduction to fewer than five produces an adequate picture. 'Holistic' tells researchers to look at the whole. LVT tells them what the whole consists of and why any omission constitutes not a simplification but a distortion.
4. Recursivity Levels and the Structure of Coordination
The five mediations describe what is always present in mesocosmic coordination. They do not yet say how coordination relates to itself, how the ongoing process of living becomes available to awareness, articulation, and reflection. For this, LVT introduces five levels of recursivity. These levels are properties of the coordinative field, not stages of individual consciousness. LVT does not begin from experience or consciousness and work outward toward the world. It begins from multi-mediated coordination itself, and the recursivity levels describe how that coordination becomes, under certain conditions, available to itself.
L1 is seamless coordination. At L1, the coordinative field operates without requiring any part of it to become an object of attention. Actions unfold without awareness of performing them. Relationships sustain without constant monitoring. The body moves, relates, inhabits, handles materials, and navigates symbolic systems without any of these dimensions demanding explicit management. Coordination at L1 is characterised by what LVT calls invisible value: the most effectively functioning coordinations leave least trace precisely because they have become conditions of ordinary life rather than achievements that must announce themselves. Ease is the signature of L1, not the absence of activity but the disappearance of symbolic management from the field of coordination.
L2 is felt misalignment. At L2, the coordinative field becomes unsettled. Something registers as wrong before any part of it can be named or described. A bodily rhythm shifts. A relational configuration produces friction. An environment begins to resist rather than afford. A material arrangement fails. The misalignment is real and operative before any symbolic articulation of it exists, and crucially, it is not yet 'experience' in any representational sense. Experience, properly speaking, already implies a coherent subject who has it and a symbolic structure through which it is organised. What L2 names is something prior to both: a disturbance in the coordinative field that has not yet been taken up by any subject and has not yet been given any symbolic form. The signal that something is wrong precedes both the person who will eventually describe it and the words in which it will eventually be described. This is not a merely abstract point. It is the reason why what SUN RISE calls 'subjective experience' cannot be what it thinks it is, and why the methods that access L3 articulations of L2 disturbance are not accessing the disturbance itself.
L3 is symbolic articulation. At L3, something becomes named: this pain, this problem, this feeling, this diagnosis, this word. L3 is where the clinical interview operates, where the research participant speaks, where the narrative study gathers its data. L3 can name immediately available felt states without requiring abstraction from many cases; it stays close to the particular, and when it does, it retains something of the L2 signal it is transforming. But the transformation is real: L3 is already a selective, structured, linguistically organised version of the disturbance, not the disturbance itself. L4 is abstraction and stabilisation. At L4, symbolic articulation moves beyond the immediate into generalisation, classification, and rule-like organisation. Diagnostic categories, treatment protocols, evidence hierarchies, and institutional decision-procedures all operate at L4. L4 is the level at which coordination is made actionable across populations and institutions, and the most socially powerful L4 categories combine abstraction with decision-guiding force. L5 is meta-recursive reflection: the level at which the categories and frameworks of L4 themselves become objects of analysis. Critique, theory, genealogy, and conceptual revision operate at L5. The present article is an L5 enterprise.
These levels are not stages of development and they are not a hierarchy in which higher is better. Coordination moves continuously and fluidly across all five levels in the course of ordinary life, and this capacity for fluid movement is itself what LVT identifies as health.
5. Recursive Fluidity as the Proper Definition of Mental Health
Mental health, on the LVT account, is recursive fluidity across all five mediations and all five recursivity levels. It is best understood positively before being understood negatively. Recursive fluidity is the ordinary condition of a life in which coordination succeeds: in which the body's rhythms sustain rather than obstruct, relationships generate support rather than depletion, environments afford rather than resist, materials function rather than fail, and symbolic systems orient rather than overload. It is the condition in which L1 ease is the normal background of living, interrupted by disturbances that are registered, addressed, and resolved, allowing return to seamless coordination. The interruptions are not pathological. They are the ordinary texture of a life that is alive to its own coordinative dynamics. What characterises health is not their absence but the capacity for movement through them and back to ease.
This positive account has an immediate consequence for how disturbance is understood. L2 felt misalignment is not the enemy of mental health. It is the signal system through which the coordinative field monitors its own integrity. A life without any L2 would be a life in which the feedback signals that allow repair and adjustment had been silenced, which is its own form of pathology. The goal of mental health intervention is therefore not the elimination of L2 but the restoration of the capacity to move through it: to register the signal, address its source across whichever mediations are involved, and return to L1. The question mental health intervention should be asking is not 'how do we reduce this person's distress scores?' but 'what would need to change, across which mediations, for this person to be able to live again?'
Recursive fluidity is also a multi-mediated concept, not a cognitive or psychological one. The capacity to move through disturbance and return to ease is not located in the mind and it is not a property of the individual. It is a property of the whole coordinative configuration. A person whose embodied rhythms have been restored, whose relationships sustain rather than deplete them, whose environment affords rather than resists, whose material conditions are adequate, and whose symbolic frameworks orient rather than distort, can absorb considerable disturbance without losing the capacity to return to L1. A person whose embodiment is chronically depleted, whose relational field is isolated or hostile, whose environment is alienating, whose material conditions are precarious, and whose symbolic world is saturated with stigma and diagnostic narratives that compound shame, has reduced recursive fluidity regardless of what is happening neurologically. The multi-mediated character of recursive fluidity is not a sociological supplement to a biological account. It is the ontological structure of what mental health is.
The SUN RISE study's finding that 'the social and political contexts are vital' and that interventions must address the full range of conditions in which people live is, in LVT terms, a recognition of this multi-mediated structure. What the report does not yet have is the conceptual precision to say why context is not merely important but constitutive: not background to the phenomenon but the field in which the phenomenon exists. Recursive fluidity is not something a person has independently of their mediational situation. It is a property of the whole coordinative configuration. This is why the same event, a significant loss, a somatic illness, a period of social isolation, can devastate one person's recursive fluidity while leaving another's largely intact, and why the difference cannot be explained by biology alone.
6. Mental Illness as Recursive Rigidity
If mental health is recursive fluidity, mental illness is recursive rigidity: the loss of the capacity to move through disturbance and return to L1. Rigidity can take several distinct forms, and the distinctions matter clinically and theoretically in ways that the concept of 'subjective experience' cannot accommodate.
The first form is L2 entrapment. In L2 entrapment, the coordinative field is locked in a self-amplifying loop of misalignment that cannot be resolved through any available means. The sleep cycle, relational rhythms, environmental affordances, material conditions, and symbolic anticipations have reorganised into a rigid configuration in which each element compounds the others. Disrupted sleep intensifies mood disturbance. Disrupted mood intensifies withdrawal from the relational field. Withdrawal from the relational field reduces the environmental and material conditions that would support repair. Reduced environmental and material affordance further disrupts sleep. The coordinative field has reorganised around a stuck point, and the rigidity is distributed across all five mediations simultaneously. What biomedicine locates as the depressive episode is, in LVT terms, a mesocosmic configuration in which recursive fluidity has collapsed across the full range of mediations at once.
The second form is L3 fixation. In L3 fixation, the coordinative field has moved from L2 to L3, from misalignment to symbolic articulation, but cannot move further. Rumination is the paradigmatic case: the symbolic articulation of the problem does not unblock movement toward resolution and return to L1. The person can name their difficulty with precision, return to the naming repeatedly, and elaborate the articulation indefinitely, without any of this producing movement in the coordinative field. L3 fixation is not the same as lacking insight; it is insight that has itself become a form of rigidity. Certain therapeutic practices inadvertently compound this: if the goal of therapy is understood as the production of ever-more-accurate narrative self-understanding, the therapeutic work may intensify L3 fixation rather than restoring the fluidity that would allow movement through articulation and back toward ease.
The third form is L4 imposition. In L4 imposition, institutional categories and protocols override the L2-L3 dynamics of the person without engaging with them. The clinician who administers a standardised rating scale, produces an aggregate score, issues a diagnosis, and initiates a treatment protocol has moved directly from L2 signal to L4 response without passing through the particular person's actual L2-L3 situation. The diagnostic category shapes what futures are imaginable, reorganises the person's self-understanding, generates expectations about treatment and prognosis, and activates the symbolic machinery of stigma, all before the person's own coordinative dynamics have been adequately engaged. The L4 imposition is not necessarily wrong in its content; the category may accurately describe the clinical picture. But it forecloses the L2-L3 movement rather than facilitating it, and it replaces the particular mesocosmic situation with an institutional classification that abstracts from precisely the features that would determine what kind of intervention could restore recursive fluidity.
These three forms of rigidity are different pathological configurations that call for different interventions. L2 entrapment may require pharmacological intervention to reduce the amplitude of the embodied loop sufficiently that movement becomes possible again, not as a cure but as a precondition for the recovery of fluidity in other mediations. L3 fixation may require relational interventions that shift the terrain from narrative description to practical engagement and social reconnection. L4 imposition requires the kind of clinical practice that stays close to the particular: that uses diagnostic categories and treatment protocols lightly and temporarily, deploying them as heuristics ready to be revised when the particular person's coordinative dynamics call for something the category cannot accommodate. None of these distinctions is available within the framework of 'subjective experience research,' which treats all three as variants of the same thing: a person's inner world that needs to be better registered by the research and clinical apparatus.
7. What Are Subjective Experiences About? The Question the Report Never Asks
There is a question that the SUN RISE report does not ask, and whose absence is responsible for a large proportion of its conceptual difficulties. It is the most basic question one could ask about the concept the report is built around: what are subjective experiences about? Every experience is an experience of something. Experiences have, in philosophical usage, intentionality: they are directed toward objects. The question of what a given experience is directed toward, what its object is, is not separable from its structure. The experience of pain and the experience of social rejection are not merely different in content. They are experiences of different kinds of thing, experiences that are directed toward objects of fundamentally different ontological types. The structure of the experience, what it involves, how it can be investigated, what would count as addressing it, depends on what it is an experience of.
The SUN RISE report offers only one definition of the concept it is investigating. Subjective experience, it tells us, 'encompasses the multiple ways that individuals and groups interpret and experience the world they live in. This included the ways people experience thoughts, feelings, and reactions to circumstances in which they live.' This is the entirety of the ontological content. Thoughts, feelings, reactions to circumstances. Nothing in this definition indicates that the question of what experiences are directed toward matters. The report proceeds throughout as if experiences of bodily pain, experiences of social isolation, experiences of seasonal light deprivation, and experiences of diagnostic labelling were experiences of the same basic kind, varying only in content, and accessible through the same basic methods. The intentionality question, what is this experience about, and does the aboutness determine its structure and the appropriate means of investigating it, is never raised.
This omission has a direct empirical consequence, and it is possible to trace it precisely. The five mediations of LVT describe five fundamentally different kinds of thing that experiences can be about. Experiences of embodied states, of relational dynamics, of environmental conditions, of material arrangements, and of symbolic systems are not variations within a single category. They are experiences of different types of object, with different structures, different dynamics of disturbance and repair, and different implications for research and intervention. If the report never asks what its experiences are about, it will inadvertently treat one type of experience as the paradigmatic case of the whole category, and the others will become invisible. This is precisely what has happened, and the mediational framework allows us to diagnose it with some precision.
Working through the five mediations in turn against the report's actual empirical content reveals a distribution that is strikingly uneven. Experiences of embodied states, understood through the self-recursive dynamics of the body monitoring its own condition, account for the dominant share of what the report treats as the content of subjective experience research. The three conditions the report focuses on throughout, depression, anxiety, and psychosis, are understood in the terms the report inherits and never fully revises as disturbances to internal states: disruptions to mood, disruptions to threat-appraisal, disruptions to the relation between self and world in the case of psychosis. The research methods that dominate the empirical picture are qualitative interviews, focus groups, and thematic analysis, all of which access L3 articulations of internal bodily and psychological states. Measurement studies, referenced throughout as the counterpart to subjective experience research, are instruments for quantifying self-reported internal states. Even the repeated call for arts-based methods is framed as finding better or more sensitive ways to access what is happening inside the person, rather than as recognising that the experience might be partly constituted by the material and environmental conditions the art engages with. The whole methodological discussion orbits around the question of how to get better access to what is happening within the body and mind of the individual. This is the self-recursive loop of embodiment, the body monitoring its own states, treated as the paradigmatic and largely unquestioned object of subjective experience research.
Experiences of being-with, of inter-recursive coordination with others, are partially present in the report but almost entirely at the methodological level rather than as substantive objects of inquiry. The relational dimension appears repeatedly in the form of PPI frameworks, lived experience roles, community engagement approaches, and the call for embedding 'more experiential knowledge in teams.' There is an implicit acknowledgment that relations with clinicians, care services, and peer communities shape how mental health difficulties are experienced and managed. But being-with is present as a research design consideration, not as a domain of experience to be investigated in its own right. What is the experience of care and its withdrawal? How does the inter-recursive dynamic of recognition and misrecognition shape the coordinative field within which depression or psychosis unfolds? What is the phenomenal texture of being seen or of being classified rather than seen? None of these questions appear. The word loneliness does not appear in the report, which is remarkable given that the relational deprivation it names has been among the most discussed determinants of mental health in the preceding decade. Loneliness is a disturbance of being-with at its most basic: the coordinative field of inter-recursive exchange has collapsed or been denied, and the consequence ramifies across all other mediations. That it goes unmentioned as a substantive object of inquiry illustrates precisely how far the report's implicit object, embodied self-recursivity, has crowded out the rest.
Experiences of dwelling, of the non-human environmental conditions within which coordination unfolds, are substantively absent. Geography appears once, in the important observation that 'a study exploring the subjective experience of psychosis in the UK does not tell us about the experience of psychosis in Africa or what an effective intervention for people here looks like.' But here dwelling is treated entirely as cultural variation, understood within the being-with and multisymbolism mediations, not as the constitutive role of non-human environmental conditions. Seasonal rhythms, light cycles, climate, altitude, ecological patterns, and spatial affordance do not appear as objects of inquiry. The natural environment does not appear as something people have experiences of in a way that the report treats as relevant to mental health. There is one place where dwelling almost surfaces: the brief mention of First Nations knowledge traditions in the USA and Australia, where there is a gestural acknowledgment that relationships to land and country might carry significance for mental health. But this appears as a diversity and representation issue rather than as a substantive claim about what dwelling-experiences are and how they constitute mental health. The seasonal character of depression, the restorative effects of ecological environments, the amplifying effects of urban spatial conditions, the way that altitude, terrain, and light cycles shape the coordinative field within which mood is sustained or disrupted: none of these appears. Dwelling is invisible to the report, and the reason is structural. Subjective experience is, by the definition the report uses and inherits, what goes on inside subjects. A non-human environment can only be background to that, never constitutive of it. Experiences of dwelling are invisible to subjective experience research not through oversight but by ontological necessity: the concept simply has no room for them.
Experiences of multimateriality, of coordination through tools, substances, technologies, infrastructures, and built environments, are essentially absent. Medications are implicitly present throughout, as the report is set against the backdrop of biomedical psychiatry, but they appear as treatments whose effects are evaluated rather than as objects of experience. No study is described or called for on what it is like to take antidepressant medication: how the pharmacological substance reorganises the body's self-recursive loops, how the material act of daily administration shapes self-understanding, how the side effects alter the coordinative field across multiple mediations simultaneously. Housing appears obliquely when researchers in lower- and middle-income countries note the need for research with 'direct links to service delivery,' but housing as a material condition that constitutes the form that mental distress takes is not examined. Food, clothing, physical spaces, and everyday objects are entirely absent. There is one near-miss of some interest: the report observes that people engage with subjective experiences through 'movies, podcasts, documentaries or social media stories.' These are thoroughly multimaterial platforms, digital and physical, through which experience is mediated and partially constituted. But they appear as channels for research dissemination rather than as objects of inquiry. What it is like to experience mental distress through the material mediations of a smartphone screen, a social media recommendation algorithm, or the physical architecture of a psychiatric ward: these are irreducibly multimaterial questions about mental health experience that the concept of subjective experience renders invisible.
Experiences of multisymbolism, of coordination through symbolic systems and the classificatory frameworks through which reality is organised, are largely absent with one partial exception. The report mentions 'addressing unfairness in whose knowledge is recognised and respected' as a value of this research, and identifies stigma and the 'stigma of disclosure in academic settings' as barriers to participation. These are multisymbolic phenomena: symbolic systems that assign lesser standing to certain knowledge-claims based on the identity of the claimant, that classify certain forms of distress as disorder and thereby reorganise the person's relationship to their own experience. But even here the multisymbolic dimension appears as an institutional barrier rather than as a substantive domain of experience. The experience of being diagnosed, of having one's coordinative disturbance translated into a category that does not fit it, of navigating a symbolic environment saturated with public narratives about mental illness that may compound rather than relieve distress, of being subject to prognostic framings that foreclose rather than open possible futures: these are experiences of multisymbolism that are among the most consequential determinants of how mental illness unfolds and whether recovery is possible. They are not absent from the lives of the people the report speaks for. They are absent from the conceptual framework that determines what counts as an object of inquiry.
The mediational audit of the report's content reveals a distribution that is not accidental. Embodied self-recursivity accounts for the substantial majority of what the report treats as the paradigmatic content of subjective experience in mental health. Being-with accounts for a further portion, though predominantly at the methodological level. Multisymbolism is present as a trace, visible in discussions of stigma and knowledge hierarchies. Dwelling and multimateriality are substantively absent. This distribution is not the result of empirical omission. The researchers are not careless. It is the result of the concept itself. 'Subjective experience,' as the report defines and deploys it, is constitutively oriented toward the interior of the experiencing subject. It concerns thoughts, feelings, and reactions. It reaches its natural boundary at the skin of the body and the edge of the social encounter. What lies beyond that boundary, the non-human environment, the material arrangements of life, the symbolic infrastructure of classification and narrative, can only appear as context for the experience, not as its object. The concept shapes what can be seen, and what it cannot see is three of the five mediations through which the mesocosm is constituted.
The consequence for research is substantial. If mental health research oriented around subjective experience systematically fails to investigate what experiences of dwelling, multimateriality, and multisymbolism consist in, it will consistently underestimate the contribution of these mediations to both mental distress and its recovery. It will not ask what the experience of light deprivation in high-latitude winters is for people with recurrent depression. It will not ask how the material texture of housing shapes the coordinative field within which anxiety takes hold or releases. It will not ask what the experience of being subject to a diagnostic framework that was constructed without reference to one's own cultural context feels like, or how it reorganises the possibilities for self-understanding and help-seeking. These are not marginal questions. They are among the most consequential determinants of mental health and illness, and they remain invisible because the dominant concept cannot accommodate them as objects of inquiry rather than as background conditions.
8. What SUN RISE Has Actually Found
Reread through the framework of recursive fluidity and the mediational audit of its implicit object, the SUN RISE findings acquire a sharpness that their own conceptual language does not allow them to have. The study's core empirical finding is not that 'subjective experience matters' and should be taken more seriously. Its core finding is that the dominant framework of mental health research has misspecified its object, and that this misspecification produces systematic failure not despite the sophistication of the methods but through it.
The context-specificity finding is now even more precisely legible. The SUN RISE report observes that 'this work is context specific and does not easily translate to different places, topics and times.' In the light of the mediational analysis, this finding can be specified: what varies across contexts is not merely cultural meaning but the whole mesocosmic configuration, including dwelling conditions, material arrangements, and symbolic systems that the concept of subjective experience cannot register as primary objects. A study of depression in an Inuit community conducted entirely through qualitative interview will capture embodied self-recursive states and some relational dynamics, but it will systematically underweight the constitutive role of seasonal darkness, ecological disruption, and the material conditions of an economy in transition. The context-specificity is not incidental variation around a shared core experience. It is the expression of genuinely different mesocosmic configurations in which all five mediations are differently arranged.
The finding about methodological plurality, that 'a need for researchers and teams to be willing to widen their understanding of what research is and can be, both methodologically and theoretically,' can now be read as a recognition that different methods are required not merely for pragmatic or political reasons but because different mediations are not equally accessible to any single method. Interview methods access L3 articulations within the embodiment and being-with mediations. They have no systematic access to dwelling, limited access to multimateriality, and access to multisymbolism only insofar as it is already articulated in language. Arts-based methods, participatory practices, ecological engagement approaches, and community-based work access different parts of the coordinative field. Their combination is necessary because the object is irreducibly multi-mediated and no single method can cover it.
The evidence hierarchy finding, that 'neither qualitative nor subjective experiences research are featured' in the hierarchy used to guide global health policy, reflects the mismatch between the method's ontological assumptions and the domain it is being asked to assess. Randomised controlled trials are extraordinarily well-designed to extract projectable stability from non-recursive regularities. What they cannot measure, by design, is precisely what matters most for recursive fluidity: the relational, environmental, and material conditions that constitute the person's coordinative capacity. The demand for RCT evidence of the effectiveness of community gardening projects, peer support programmes, or culturally-embedded healing practices reflects a fundamental mismatch: it asks the intervention to demonstrate its effects through the channel that the trial is designed to measure, while necessarily excluding the mediational channels through which the intervention actually operates.
The finding about lived experience knowledge, that barriers including 'the stigma of disclosure in academic settings and lack of access to traditional peer-reviewed publication pathways' prevent the people most directly affected from contributing their knowledge to research, can be read in LVT terms as a recognition that people whose recursive fluidity has been disrupted have developed L2 and L3 sensitivity across multiple mediations that researchers with uninterrupted coordinative ease do not possess. The person who has experienced severe depression has not merely had an inner state that should be recorded. They have navigated a complex coordinative disruption across embodiment, being-with, dwelling, material arrangements, and symbolic frameworks, and they have accumulated practical knowledge of which configurations sustain rigidity and which allow fluency to return. This knowledge is not primarily narrative. Much of it is embodied, material, relational, and environmental rather than linguistic. Research designs that access it only through interview are accessing its L3 trace, already filtered through the same conceptual framework that produces the limitations the report is trying to overcome.
9. The Research Programme That Recursive Fluidity Requires
If mental health is recursive fluidity and mental illness is recursive rigidity across the five mediations, the research programme that follows is substantially different from what 'subjective experience research' implies. The difference is not primarily about methods, though methods will change. It is about the research question.
The SUN RISE report asks, in various formulations: how can subjective experience be better incorporated into mental health research? The LVT research question is different: what configurations of the mesocosm sustain recursive fluidity, what configurations disrupt it, and what interventions restore it? These are not the same question. The first question keeps the researcher on the outside, looking in at an individual's inner states and trying to incorporate their reports into an existing scientific framework. The second question positions the researcher inside the mesocosmic configuration, mapping a field rather than extracting reports from a subject.
The mediational audit of the SUN RISE report suggests a more specific version of this research agenda. Subjective experience research has done most of what it can do within the embodiment and being-with mediations, and it has done important work there. The frontiers are elsewhere. Research into dwelling-mediated experiences of mental health, into how seasonal rhythms, ecological conditions, light environments, and spatial affordances constitute the form that distress takes and the conditions under which fluency returns, is almost entirely undeveloped. Research into multimaterial experiences, into how the material texture of daily life, medicines, housing, food, technology, and built environments shapes the coordinative field within which mental health exists, is similarly sparse. Research into the multisymbolic constitution of mental health experience, into how diagnostic categories, public narratives, prognostic frameworks, and classificatory systems reorganise the person's coordinative possibilities rather than merely describing them, remains largely at the level of critique rather than empirical investigation.
The methodological implication is not simply that more qualitative methods are needed, though they are. It is that the research needs to be mesocosmographic: mapping the full coordinative configuration across all five mediations, attending to how that configuration changes over time, and tracking where fluidity exists and where rigidity has taken hold. Mesocosmography is not a named tradition from which LVT borrows. It is the empirical mode that the theory requires: the systematic study of how living coordination is configured, disrupted, and restored in particular situations. It draws on whatever disciplinary resources are available, including qualitative and quantitative methods, clinical observation, ecological and material approaches, and symbolic analysis, without being reducible to any of them, because its object is the coordinative field rather than any single dimension of it.
The SUN RISE report calls for researchers to 'be willing to interrogate assumptions in your own field, especially around objectivity, diagnostic categories, and what counts as legitimate knowledge or ways of doing research.' LVT endorses this fully and takes it one step further: the assumption that most urgently needs interrogating is the assumption that subjective experience is the right name for the object of inquiry. The call for reflexivity about positionality addresses the relationship between the researcher and the research participant. What is additionally needed is reflexivity about the ontological assumptions that determine what counts as data in the first place. A researcher who understands that they are mapping a mesocosmic configuration, not capturing a subjective experience, will attend to what the person cannot articulate as well as to what they can, to the embodied, environmental, and material dimensions of the situation as well as to the narrative, and to the conditions that would need to change for fluidity to be restored rather than only to the description of what rigidity feels like from the inside.
The success criterion for mental health intervention needs to change alongside the research question. The question is not whether the intervention reduces symptoms on a validated rating scale. It is whether the intervention restores recursive fluidity. This includes symptom reduction, but it is not identical with it. An intervention that reduces Hamilton Rating Scale scores while leaving the person unable to sleep without chemical suppression, unable to sustain a relationship, unable to leave the house, has achieved a measurable change and missed the point. An intervention that leaves some residual disturbance in the coordinative field but restores the person's capacity to work, relate, engage with their environment, and return to L1 in the spaces between disturbances has succeeded in the relevant sense even if the rating scale does not show it.
10. The Concept That Was Always Being Pointed At
The SUN RISE report closes its account of the concept of subjective experience with the observation that 'exploring how people understand, undertake, engage with, share and value subjectivity as related to illness and health experiences in research surfaced several live debates and enduring tensions in the sphere of mental health.' These debates and tensions are not incidental. They are the index of a concept that is pointing at something real while being inadequate to what it is pointing at.
The concept of recursive fluidity is not offered here as a correction of the SUN RISE project's conclusions. Its empirical findings are robust and important. The study correctly identifies that mental health research has been systematically missing something that is not marginal but central. It correctly identifies that this missing element is context-specific and resists standardisation. It correctly identifies that methodological and disciplinary pluralism is required to engage with it. It correctly identifies that the people who have lived through disrupted coordination have knowledge that professional researchers need and currently cannot access adequately. All of this is right. What is not yet right is the name, and as the mediational analysis has shown, the wrong name is not merely a terminological inconvenience. It actively determines which mediations become visible as objects of inquiry and which are structurally excluded.
The oscillation in mental health research between reductionist biology and narrative self-report is not accidental and it is not resolvable within either pole. Both are downstream attempts to stabilise something that originates at L2 and only later becomes symbolically articulable. Biological research reaches for the non-recursive substrate of a constitutively recursive phenomenon. Narrative research reaches for the L3 traces of a pre-symbolic disturbance. Neither reaches L2 itself, because L2 is prior to both the biological object and the narrating subject. This is the structural reason for the oscillation, and it is not addressable by combining the two approaches or by adding more diverse methods on top of the existing framework. It requires a different starting point: the mesocosmic coordinative field in which both the biological and the narrative are already downstream products, and in which dwelling, materiality, and symbolic infrastructure are constitutive rather than contextual.
'Subjective experience' names the phenomenon from the outside, from the perspective of a research system that has already relegated it to a secondary category. It accepts the framing of the dominant paradigm and then argues for the inclusion of what the paradigm has excluded. This is an important institutional move, and the SUN RISE team is right to make it. But it is not an adequate ontological account of what is at stake. Recursive fluidity names the phenomenon from the inside: from the coordinative field in which bodies, relations, environments, materials, and symbols are always already co-present, and in which the capacity for seamless movement through all of them is what mental health actually consists in.
What mental health research has called 'subjective experience' is not a secondary supplement to objective science. It is the name given to L2 coordinative disturbance after it has already been transformed into L3 articulation and then positioned within the Enlightenment binary that produces 'subjective' as a category in the first place. And as the mediational analysis of the SUN RISE report reveals, not even all of L2 has been captured under that name: the disturbances that arise through dwelling, through material conditions, and through the symbolic infrastructure of classification remain outside the frame, invisible not because they are unimportant but because the concept has no room for them. The future of mental health research does not lie in integrating subjective experience into existing science. It lies in replacing the ontology that made 'subjective experience' seem like the right name for what was always, from the start, a disruption in the full field of living coordination.
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