A Home for Psychotic Depression: Building a Personal Knowledge Base for Meaning-Making in Obsidian

Abstract

This project outlines the creation of a multimedia prototype for an interactive digital environment that supports meaning-making, particularly in the context of psychotic depression, where meaning-making is severely compromised. The prototype comes in the form of a personal knowledge base (PKB) that captures and explores situational meanings and facilitates assisted meaning-making. The PKB was produced through techniques adapted from personal knowledge management — such as Johnny.Decimal, the Slip-box Method, and Maps of Content — and insights formed from my lived experience with psychotic depression, including a private dataset containing my firsthand account of the condition and other personal information.

The methodology employed for the project is an iterative design approach that employs Obsidian third-party plugins, CSS, JavaScript, and Python to extend the functionality of the default Obsidian vault into a PKB optimized for meaning-making. Each iteration was documented using a changelog with semantic versioning. The methodology is rooted in the proposed Multimedia Meaning-making Model for Psychotic Depression (M4PD), a novel integrative framework derived from Hyper-meaning (van Os, 2014), Kegan’s Theory of Meaning-making (Kegan et al., 1982; Kegan, 1994), and the Meaning Making Model (Park, 2022).

The project spanned an estimated 1 year, with the latest version of the PKB at Version 2.2.0. The PKB has multiple features that collectively enable the streamlined capture and exploration of situational meanings — which are excessive in states of psychosis — and facilitate assisted meaning-making, which addresses the disruptions to global meaning caused by depression.

It is to be noted that the PKB successfully produced a topological network of over 12,000 nodes, comprised of entries about psychotic depression and my personal life from 2018 to 2025, suggesting an emergent yet unrefined map of my meaning-making. The results presented in this project are part of an ongoing, larger effort to develop an interactive digital environment for supporting meaning-making. The project concludes with a call for a future product, unique enough to warrant its own designation — the Personal Meaning Base or PMB.