Book excerpt: Chris Kearney and Tim Trull's ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE: A DIMENSIONAL APPROACH provides students with a concise, contemporary, science-based view of psychopathology that emphasizes the individual first and the disorder second. Through consistent pedagogy featuring clinical cases and real first-person narratives, the text illuminates our understanding that abnormal behavior--rather than being either present or absent--exists in everyone to some degree on a continuum from normal to pathological. By highlighting this widely accepted dimensional view--which places the behavior of an individual at the forefront of clinical assessment, prevention, definition, and treatment--the text's goal is to encourage students to become intelligent consumers of mental health information. With its emphasis on assessment and treatment as well as prevention, the book gives students the tools necessary to understand the precursors of abnormal behavior, overcome the stigma associated with it, and identify the real people classified as exhibiting it.