People with psychiatric experience are not only mentally ill – most actively shape their lives, using their own interpretive patterns for their individual experiences. A psychosis can thus be seen not only as a breakdown of mental functions but also as a subjective attempt at finding solutions or coping. Various theorists have engaged with this understanding of illness and health and developed models around it. This book presents the approaches of Laing, Ciompi, Mentzos, Wulff, and Bock, along with their existentialist, systems-theoretical, psychoanalytic, ethnopsychiatric, and anthropological strands of subject orientation. All of them are theorists who have had or continue to have a significant influence on psychiatric practice. Their names are associated, for example, with the end of asylums, Soteria, and the Ps.