Description: This widely adopted text and practical guidebook presents the fundamentals of family-based intervention with clients struggling with chronic poverty-related crises and life stressors. Grounded in Salvador Minuchin's influential systemic model and the extensive experience of all three highly regarded authors, the book illustrates innovative ways for professionals within substance abuse, foster care, and mental health contexts to build collaboration with families and other helpers, and to elicit families' strengths.
Review Quotes: "The authors provide brilliant descriptions of how families as systems attempt to survive, how government agencies as systems attempt to help, and how the 2 or more systems interact....Of great value are specific word-for-word accounts of interactions that demonstrate how one approaches system-thinking on one's feet. While the authors stress that clinicians should restrain their expertise, that is not a call for passivity. Instead, as one reads the interactions of these clinicians with the families, one is impressed with the courage of the clinicians. This book has multiple strengths....We applaud this book for its attempt to call attention to a group that is largely overlooked, yet whose members have the potential to make positive changes in their lives if given some help. The writers are on the front lines of this fight, and by describing their experiences with their clients, they put a human face on problems society would prefer to ignore....Those who work with the multicrisis poor will find this book a useful resource."-- "Journal of Clinical Psychiatry" (12/22/2006 12:00:00 AM)