This fascinating book brings together a multidisciplinary team of authors from a variety of backgrounds and lived experience who offer insight into the historical roots and current reasons for the hybrid natural and social scientific conceptual platform of psychiatry. The role of values in the development and recovery from mental illness are covered as well as progressive developments, outlining a novel research methodology. Demonstrating the importance of the integration of each main dimension of psychiatry (such as biological, psychological, social, and existential), the book includes values in theory and research in working out the epistemological foundations of psychiatry as an academic discipline and in clinical practice. Covering the major directions from which the subject of mental ill health has been approached (neurobiology, psychoanalysis and the psychotherapies), the common conditions and the controversies surrounding them are explored. Highly relevant to academics, clinicians and students in psychiatry, psychology, primary and social care.