Visibility in the Life-World of Paranoia: Between Shame and Trust

This handbook brings together psychiatry, clinical psychology, philosophy, and public mental health to examine how phenomenology and values-based practice can inform personalised, recovery-oriented mental health care. Framed by a pluralistic “thousand flowers” approach, the volume complements symptom-based and evidence-based paradigms by foregrounding lived experience, meaning, and individual values in clinical decision-making. Across six thematic parts, the book develops a shared decision-making model that integrates empirical evidence with phenomenological psychopathological analysis and patient priorities. Foundational chapters introduce key concepts including values-based practice, phenomenological psychopathology, and recovery as an outcome defined by what matters to the individual. Subsequent sections present applied case studies and conceptual contributions demonstrating how phenomenology and values-based practice enrich diagnosis, dialogue, and treatment planning in mental health care. The volume also critically examines methodological and ethical challenges — such as intersectionality, diagnostic frameworks, and the limits of phenomenological reduction — while advancing co-production, equality of voices, and narrative-informed approaches to care. By combining expertise-by-training and expertise-by-experience, it highlights the role of dialogue and lived experience in shaping clinically meaningful outcomes. The Handbook of Phenomenology, Values and Clinical Decision-Making in Personalised Mental Health Care: Contemporary Approaches and Challenges will be of interest to researchers and clinicians in clinical psychology, psychiatry, philosophy of psychiatry, and health humanities, as well as those working in personalised and recovery-oriented mental health care.