This challenging book is based on the experience of the pioneering Buckingham project, a comprehensive mental health service focusing on primary care, and describes a new approach to the provision of mental health service to a community. Using the vulnerability-stress model of mental illness, the authors place their findings and recommendations in the wider context of mental health care provision, and draw widely on international research in this field. They insist on a rigorous approach to the provision and evaluation of care, and use telling case studies to reveal the benefits as well as some of the difficulties that may be experienced. The practical and cost effective approach described will be of the greatest interest to health care professionals in whatever treatment setting they may be working.