Creating alternative therapeutic spaces in psychiatry: a tribute to Loren R. Mosher

Background For much of the 20th century, psychosocial approaches to psychosis were rejected by conventional psychiatry. However, Loren R. Mosher, an American psychiatrist, drawing on the ideas of R. D. Laing and the tenets of interpersonal phenomenology, set up the Soteria project in California, and in so doing made his mark on the psychosocial treatment of psychosis. This essy revisits Mosher's life's work, analysing some of the implications derived from his creation of alternative therapeutic spaces in psychiatry for those stigmatized, medicalized, and objectified within a psychiatric category.