Traditional protocol among the helping professions, including social work, involves identifying and labeling particular pathologies and weaknesses of clients and then prescribing treatment to correct the functioning deficits.

The Strengths Model is the first text to focus exclusively on the alternative - the strengths model of practice, which focuses on helping people, not as patients or clients, but as individuals. Empirical testing of this model and its results have consistently shown that it is superior to traditional approaches for serving people with mental illness.

The Strengths Model presents the theory, values, and principles on which the model was founded, as well as explicit practice methods that have been developed and refined over the past fifteen years. Offering a good balance between theory and practice, this text is ideal for students in social work, psychology, nursing, psychiatry, vocational rehabilitation, and occupational therapy, as well as for case managers and other mental health professionals and practitioners.