Focusing on new directions in professional practice with families of people with mental illness, this book offers a multidisciplinary systems-orientated examination of the theory, research, and practice in this area. Features of this text include a consideration of lifespan and family system and subsystem perspectives, as well as the inclusion of powerful personal accounts of family members. It is written from the perspective of a competence paradigm for clinical practice, which offers a constructive alternative to the more prevalent pathology models of the past.