ABSTRACT
The Cleveland Plain Dealer featured an article on the cloudiest cities in America, which turned out to be Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Cleveland, and Seattle. The author grew up in the first, attended graduate school in the second, and began his life as a professor in the third. The shape of his destiny points in the direction of Seattle, a city renowned for serial killers, suicides, and coffee houses. The author makes a mental note to resist the temptation to complete the cycle. In his first lecture, he told students that Jules Henry's work towered over other attempts to draw conclusions about mental illness from direct observations of families in their home environment. While many researchers look upon the mundane details of everyday life as trivial, Henry shows that concentrating on common, everyday family activities can produce profound insights that escape researchers who restrict observations of families to a clinic or to controlled empirical studies.
