Points of View is desingned to provide students at various levels of experience and training with illustrative examples of individuals with different forms of psychopathology. The work is designed primarily for students who are studying descriptive psychopathology, including psychiatric residents, medical students on psychiatry rotations graduate students in psychology, or students in various related mental health fields, including psychiatric nursing, social work, and school counseling. The stories are written to illustrate the key elements of psychopathology for these various disorders.

Each is written from two perspectives: the perspective of the individual who has the disorder, and the perspective of someone else in their environment (e.g. a family member, a friend, a doctor). The thoughts of these individuals, as opposed to their speech, are given in parentheses. This design was chosen to attempt to illustrate not only how people with these disorders think and feel themselves but also how they appear to other people around them. The emphasis, therefore, is on the difficulties, often the suffering, experienced by people with various mental illnesses, and also on the adverse impact these illnesses have on others, which is often substantial.