Understanding Womens Recovery from Illness and Trauma is a practical guide to the "why" and "how" questions of human responses to illness. With this volume, Margaret Kearney presents aspects of womens experiences that counselors are not always exposed to, and provides support in the treatment of women who are facing or recovering from serious illness and other health crises. This book draws on qualitative data from a variety of sources and offers a theoretical model of womens health and identity. Kearney begins with an overview of that model and discusses the grounded theory approach to collecting and analyzing experiential data. She next moves on to describing a number of health crises, recovery situations, womens responses to these events, and discusses clinical implications for women undergoing these experiences. The author also examines womens approaches to staying healthy and balancing their lives, and she closes by suggesting areas for future research. She also discusses policy implications for health and human service agencies that deal specifically with women from various cultural and ethnic groups. Understanding Womens Recovery from Illness and Trauma synthesizes the many studies that have been conducted on the topic across various disciplines. As such, this book provides one of the first general resources for therapists and counselors who work with women. It will also be particularly interesting to graduate and undergraduate students of clinical psychology, counseling, and social work, womens studies, and education. This volume will prove useful for in-service training programs for counselors, social workers, nurses, and psychologists.