1.Social work and mental health.
As mentioned in the previous unit, social workers are involved with people experiencing mental health issues in almost every area of their practice. Interestingly, funding bodies often assume that services respond to a specific issue, such as housing or corrections, and do so without an informed expectation of how responses may differ to clients or communities with particular needs. Some of you may work in services that explicitly respond to the needs of people with mental health issues, whereas others might find their point of contact with the mental health sector less formal.
With each different point of contact, the roles and expectations for social workers change. This unit invites you to consider the underlying principles of social work and how these provide a framework for responding to the needs of individual clients or communities you may work with in relation to mental health.
- Social Justice & Human Rights
This section begins with a section from the AASW Final Report on the development of Competency Standards for Mental Health Social Workers.
Ten marks out of fifty for Assessment 1 relate to an understanding of how mental health and mental illness can impact on human rights and social justice. You might want to consider how the ideas from this unit can relate to the issue of homelessness.
a) What is different about a social work role on a multidisciplinary team? What are the underlying principles that guide social work? Are these really any different to other professions in the mental health arena? Why or why not? Housing services may comprise of multidisciplinary teams too; positions may be filled by staff from nursing, youth work, psychology and other disciplines.
b) How might you begin to look at the human rights implications of service delivery in a particular agency? If you have had no contact with accommodation services and don’t know where to begin a critical analysis, consider starting a thread on the discussion board of LearnJCU asking for more information from other students.
c) The idea of participation is raised in the AASW Competency Standards and in your second reading. Why is participation so important to social work practice? Could the idea of participation be included in your assignment?
