The person’s values determine the meaning structure of the world they live in and drive their actions. The depressed patient’s values tend to change dramatically over the weeks and usually return to normal. At the height of their illness, patients can constantly feel that they are transgressing important personal and group values.

Examining the values at play is similar to creating a map with three dimensions: (1) the level of organization/proximity to primary stakeholders; (2) the hierarchy; and (3) the temporality of values. The patient’s values can be misaligned with those of others temporarily owing to the illness, and value-mapping can facilitate realignment. Changes in value hierarchy are often necessary for recovery. These changes can be dramatic and can happen at a faster pace whilst the person is becoming ill and during recovery.

The patient can be temporarily cut off from the values they would normally hold. Besides records of their former wishes and collateral information, sources of knowledge about value changes include peer support workers, first-hand narratives, philosophical and social scientific studies, media reports, and art portrayal of depression. Changes in one’s life narrative are also essential for recovery and resilience. The patient’s social environment, including the professionals, can facilitate (or hinder) this.

Developing a satisfactory explanation of the pathomechanism of mental illness, developing biomarkers to aid diagnosis, developing an aetiological classification system, and developing effective treatments to achieve both symptom elimination and functional recovery has so far remained the holy grail of psychiatry for most conditions. To make progress, psychiatric research needs to integrate the biological, psychological, sociocultural, and existential dimensions of mental illness and incorporate and work with values more efficiently. This chapter offers a methodology for this through first describing value-mapping and then elucidating the potential contribution of qualitative and mixed-method studies, phenomenological, hermeneutic, and other idiographic approaches, interpretative phenomenological analysis, analytic induction, quasi-judicial approaches, and the history of psychiatry.

An essential prerequisite of any breakthrough here would be going back to the person level. Research centres would need to become truly multidisciplinary to bring together researchers with expertise in the relevant natural and social sciences and the medical humanities as well as experts by experience for effective co-production.