This book beautifully elucidates and illuminates a vital, but too often unseen or misunderstood truth about the relationship between mind and body and the relationship between problems and attempted solutions: how we make sense of troubling experience affects how we attempt to change it, and both efforts—to understand and to intervene—instantly circle back and become inextricably woven into the experience itself. This truth pervades the world of psychotherapy, where models for healing or curing can inadvertently and tragically contribute to the creation and exacerbation of the very 'illnesses' they define and seek to ameliorate. Liberation from this paradoxical knot is no easy feat; it requires the kind of systemic wisdom offered in this collection of essays by the Becvars and their co-author, Lynne Reif. Their capacity for clear recursive thinking and warm-hearted caring never wavers.

Douglas Flemons, PhD, LMFT, professor emeritus, Nova Southeastern University; author of Completing Distinctions, Of One Mind, and The Heart and Mind of Hypnotherapy

The Paradox of Mental Health: Toward Systemic and Social Constructionist Therapies by Raphael Becvar, the late Dorothy Becvar, and Lynne Reif is a revolutionary work that provides a desperately needed challenge to the assumptions that underpin our mental health system. The authors skillfully shine a light on the epistemological paradigm that frames the very idea that mental illness exists and that it is solely located within individuals. They expose many of our societally taken-for-granted assumptions about what is normal and what is pathological, and they even help us to see that the very concepts of normalcy and pathology are part of a particular paradigm, yet other paradigms are possible. And this is where the hope resides. Not only does this book deconstruct the foundations undergirding the assumptions that shape the modern mental health system, the authors use systems theory and social constructionism to present an alternative paradigm for understanding what it is to be a human, to struggle and suffer, and to heal and grow.

Tracey Laszloffy, PhD, LMFT, Center for Healing Connections

The Paradox of Mental Health by Ray Becvar, Dorothy Becvar, and Lynne Reif is a clarion call to therapists to resist the surging drift into the world of individual mental health/ill-health by reclaiming our systemic family therapy roots. With each chapter the authors invite us to see our world as relational and complex, deserving of close attention and reflection. As they have done for many years in our field of family therapy, they welcome us home again.

Dan Wulff and Sally St. George, University of Calgary