John Strauss is a psychiatrist who has carried out a wide range of clinical research with persons who have severe mental disorders. These studies have focused on issues of diagnosis, course of disorder, and the processes of improvement and have emphasized the role of the person with mental disorder as a person in the struggle to recover. Most recently, John Strauss’ work has focused on understanding in depth the subjective experiences of people with severe disorder. He believes that these experiences provide crucial data for understanding and treating the basic processes involved in disorder and recovery. The ultimate goal is to construct a human science of psychiatry, an understanding of what we call mental illness that is scientific while also attending to the complexity and subtleties of human experience.