Social Work for People with Mental Health Problems - Coursework Example

Running Head: SOCIAL WORK FOR PEOPLE WITH MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS Social Work For People With Mental Health Problems [Name Of Student] [Name Of Institution] SOCIAL WORK FOR PEOPLE WITH MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS INTRODUCTION Social workers, in distinction from other helping professionals, are unique in that their code of ethics specifically requires that they strive to attain social justice in all areas of practice. By exploring research and theoretical contributions from the fields of organizational studies, social psychology, education, anthropology, developmental psychology, and sociology, this article examines conceptions of authority within contemporary social work practice in managed mental health care settings. The purpose of this article is to achieve a greater understanding of how social workers may potentially or actually use their authority to create managed care organizations (MCOs) that support the ethical principles and values of professional social work practice. Moreover, I shall discuss how does an understanding of social needs; social divisions, oppression and psychiatry help social workers in their work with people with physical and mental health problems. DISCUSSION In traditional hierarchical organizational models, authority is defined as “the given right to perform roles: such rights are legitimated by consensual decisions codified in constitutions, contracts, charters, rulings, and other accepted institutional sanctions” (Kahn & Kram, 1994, p. 17). Increasingly, however, traditional hierarchical organizational models are being replaced with contemporary models that emphasize collaboration and teamwork (Hirschhorn, 1997). Authority was specifically chosen for examination in this study because it has been suggested that social workers are not always comfortable exercising the power embedded within their professional and organizational roles (Rein & White, 1981). Yet it has been suggested that when organization members identify themselves with the authority mandated to their roles, they may have the “legitimate power to pursue their rights, duties, and obligations in the service of their tasks” (Kahn & Kram, 1994, p. 17). In addition to a generalist social work base, the mental health worker should have specific and integrated knowledge of mental and child development, attachment theory, family dynamics (including understanding associatesing and parenting), social functioning, minority and poor families, prevention, and crisis theory (Nover & Timberlake, 1989; Schrage & Eggbeer, 1989).In addition to this knowledge base, the worker should be able to: make home visits: Reaching out to families in their homes has proven to be an effective method for identifying and engaging vulnerable mentals and their families (Weatherston & Tableman, 1989). serve as a therapeutic case manager: The mental health social worker engages in assessing mentals, associates, and their families and in providing concrete service, support, and interpretation. Other agencies and professionals often carry out intervention plans; however, the social worker must be able to make the referrals in a manner that allows the associates to feel supported and encouraged. This may mean driving the associates to the public aid or WIC office yet also knowing when to encourage and expect the associates to act independently. If, in times of stress, the associates can rely on the social worker, she may be able to be more available to her own mental. work effectively with other professions: Mental health is a field that uses the knowledge and skills of many professions. In addition to social workers, the mental health field includes pediatricians, nurses, speech and physical therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, special education and early childhood education teachers, and developmental specialists. The effective social worker will appreciate and understand social work's contribution to the mental health team and will establish egalitarian, open relationships with other professionals. In addition to other responsibilities, the social worker will often serve as an unofficial coordinator of the team and may serve as case manager. IMPACT OF SOCIAL DIVISIONS In the last 20 years, the ascendance of MCOs has revolutionized the ways that health and mental health care are financed, structured, and provided. Increasingly, clinical social workers have replaced medical and other non-medical practitioners as the more cost-effective and, therefore, the preferred providers of mental health services in managed care settings (Cohen, 2003). Shapiro (1995) has defined managed care as Any kind of health care services which are paid for, all, or in part, by a third party (including any government entity) and for which the focus of any part of clinical decision-making is other than between the practitioner and the client or patient. (p. 441) Mechanic, Schlesinger, and McAlpine (1995) further explained that the main objective of managed care is to “limit unnecessary medical utilization while not withholding necessary and efficacious medical care” (p. 24). Moreover, managed care systems are increasingly used to treat clients insured by public social services, many of which are being privatized (Packard, 1989). As of June 20, 2003, 59.11% of Medicaid recipients were enrolled in private managed health care plans (Centers for Medical & Medicaid Services, 2002). Nonetheless, Mechanic (1999) suggested that the current privatization of mental health care may allow for greater innovation of services in managed care settings. Indeed, a 1990 study found that enrollment of chronically mentally ill persons into a community prepaid health plan did not result in the increased use of a publicly funded, neighboring community crisis center, as had been feared by some opponents to the plan (Dobmeyer, McKee, Miler, & Wescott, 1990). The results were inconclusive, but the authors indicated that effective case management by the prepaid health plan might have been responsible for the findings. The character of investigation "inside" the ‘ground’ of mental health has mostly taken on a advantaged ‘scientific’ groundwork and ethos which does not permit for conscious or existential indication In western society, the ideological myths concerning the intellect and body are the 'base line' - focus to increase and consolidation of ‘descriptions of pathology’ such as ‘deformity’ and ‘mental illness’. Till now as there is a record of mental illness, there is in addition a record of legislative efforts to manage and normalize classified ‘mentally ill’ people. The splendid therapeutic narratives of the body and intellect bury the site of complex intersections of pessimistic ideas about mental sickness and ‘madness’ in western civilization. It is imperative to recognize oppression as socially constructed incident that started with the industrial mode of fabrication. Thus as well as recognizing the consequence of person society or subjects' accepting and interpretations of the humankind it is uniformly imperative to have acknowledgment of structural expressions of oppression. This is a fact that affects, hampers, oppresses the existence of citizens defined as ‘mentally ill’ as well as, on circumstances, sponsoring joint responses and anti-oppressive feat. Government is raised to make sure that its own sections and other agencies take critically their alleged accountability for averting social exclusion. Along with this psychiatry has also been called to classify with consideration to the topic. The European Union founded an observatory on general policies to battle social exclusion in the year 1991, and maintains to strengthen the idea by requiring national governments to present yearly reports on how they are undertaking the subject. This is one issue that keeps the argument existing in UK strategy circles and it tends to be accepted by concern groups whenever unfairness is professed or policy precedence is sought. Gutierrez, Glen Maye, and DeLois (1995) offered a working definition of empowerment practice: The goal of effective practice is not coping or adaptation but an increase in the actual power of the client or community so that action can be taken to change and prevent the problems clients are facing. Because the effects of powerlessness can occur on many levels, efforts toward change can be directed at any level of intervention or can include multiple levels of intervention. (p. 250) On the organizational level, empowerment practice may be conceptualized as a way of encouraging full involvement and participation of line social workers in the design of socially just and responsible organizational programs and services (Simon, 1994). SOCIAL WORK CONTRIBUTION TO THE CARE AND SUPPORT OF CLIENTS WITH A RANGE OF HEALTH PROBLEMS Swenson (1998) offered ways to implement social justice perspectives in clinical practice. She identified treatment approaches that promote a social change agenda, including the strengths perspective (Saleebey, 1992, 1994; Weick, Rapp, Sullivan, & Kirsthardt, 1989), ethnic-sensitive practice (McGoldrick, Giordano, & Pearce, 1996), feminist practice (Bricker-Jenkins, Hooeyman, & Gottlieb, 1991; Van Den Bergh & Cooper, 1986), justice-oriented practice (Hopps, Pinderhughes, & Shankar, 1995), narrative approaches (Freedman & Combs, 1996; M. White, 1995; M. White & Epson, 1990), and empowerment practice (Gutierrez, 1990; Lee, 1994; Simon, 1994; Solomon, 1976). However, although these approaches are part of a social justice orientation to clinical work with clients, social workers in managed mental health care organizations may need to adapt them to the organizational level of practice. Rein and White (1981) argued that social workers who have embodied the practitioner-scientist model as a way of forging a bridge between practice and theory might have too narrowly focused their frame of practice to the “client's situation” (p. 37) and have been blindsided by their exclusion of the organizations in which practice is embedded. Developing ways for social workers to apply and test social justice interventions at the organizational level of practice may allow them to support the development of managed mental health care practices that embrace the ethical principles of social work practice (Reamer, 1997). For example, social workers in managed mental health care settings may have naturally occurring opportunities to implement social justice perspectives in their organizations through a greater use of their authority in groups (e.g., staff meetings, formal and informal work groups and task forces). The principle of social justice has been given considerably more attention in the revised Code of Ethics (National Association of Social Workers, 1996). Social work's commitment to social justice is considered a professional mandate. All social workers are expected to advocate for social change at all levels of practice, including the organizations in which they work. Abramovitz (1998) cited the paucity of literature on activism to support her contention that social workers have become largely complacent and moved away from their advocacy and social change moorings. STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL WORK The fact that managed care systems are increasingly used to treat clients insured by public social services, many of which are being privatized (Packard, 1989), should compel social workers and other mental health providers to reconsider the ways that they use their authority in institutional settings. B. Jordan (1997) defined authoritative knowledge as knowledge that comes to be accepted as true not because it is correct but because it counts by virtue of its structural superiority over other kinds of knowledge: “The devaluation of nonauthoritative knowledge systems is a general mechanism by which hierarchical knowledge structures are generated and displayed” (p. 56). Social workers may unwittingly devalue their own locally derived knowledge base by inadvertently colluding with hierarchical knowledge structures that are oppressive to them and their clients. B. Jordan (1997) offered help to social workers who may wish to reclaim their own authority. Making reference to the work of Lave and Wenger (1991), she observed that the legitimization of what comes to be accepted as authoritative knowledge takes place within communities of practice. She stated that “it is an interactionally grounded notion” (B. Jordan, 1997, p. 58) and must be collaboratively achieved by participants in particular situations. She defined authoritative knowledge as “the knowledge that within a community is considered legitimate, consequential, official, worthy of discussion, and appropriate for justifying particular actions by people engaged in accomplishing the tasks at hand” (p. 58). Using this foundation lends plausibility to the contention that prevailing managed care policies in organizations maintain their authoritative superiority only when workers collaboratively agree to uphold those policies in communities of practice (i.e., through their participation in organizational meetings and formal and informal groups). This collaborative agreement may be either overtly or covertly achieved and may take the form of nonparticipation by staff members when new managed care policies and practices are presented to them by management. The ideas of Lave and Wenger (1991) and other “practice” theorists provide compelling arguments for the constitutive nature of hierarchical authority relations and the potentially collusive practices that sustain and nurture them. Therefore, according to this perspective, for social workers to change or recreate an organization's practices and policies, it may be necessary for them to more actively and deliberately participate in that organization's groups and meetings. Recasting the concept of authority as a collaboratively achieved phenomenon and exploring how to facilitate its use by social workers in organizations may serve to increase social workers' participation in groups, improve the overall functioning of organizations, and, ultimately, create more socially responsible managed care practices and policies. This may require new definitions of authority that are process oriented and collaboratively achieved rather than definitions based on hierarchical relationships between superiors and subordinates or valued notions of the autonomous professional. THE DEVELOPMENT OF GROUP RELATIONS TRAINING AND THEORY Research in group relations training and theory suggests ways that social workers may more deliberately and effectively use their authority in groups to impact the creation of practices and policies within their managed mental health care organizations. Group relations training began in the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London after World War II and was built from the tradition that social science can be used in the construction of a better social order. The training of the Tavistock Institute sought to provide a “technical understanding of authority” and was conveyed “through the inventiveness with which they [the trainees] developed and extended their own work” (P. Miller & Rose, 1994, p. 37). P. Miller and Rose contended that after World War II, the technology of “the group” was primarily used to “transform” those engaged in training. “To reach the depths of the person, a new form of learning was required: ‘experiential learning’” (p. 37). One of the key inventors of experiential group learning was Wilfred Bion (e.g., Bion, 1946), who had developed a group method for selecting military officers. Wilfred Bion (1946) developed a technique of selecting officers in which leadership potentials became manifest through observation of how individuals operated in groups that did not have an overt authority structure and in which external directions were absent. The essence of the technique … was to provide a framework in which selecting officers … could observe a man's capacity for maintaining personal relationships in a situation of strain that tempted him to disregard the interests of his fellows for the sake of his own. (Bion, 1946, p. 77) Built on Bion's (1946) work, the central question within the task of group relations training “was one of authority and the problems encountered in its exercise, to assist the individual to struggle to exercise one's own authority, to manage oneself in role, and to become less a captive of group and organizational processes” (P. Miller & Rose, 1991, p. 49). Bion (1977) conceptualized that organizations were established to preserve the wisdom of the past and make possible the future vision of the truly creative individual. Yet, paradoxically, he viewed the organization as endangered by the emergence of that vision. An underlying tenet of group relations theory is that the need to belong to a group is powerful. Needing to belong can result in the loss of precious contributions of wisdom. Efforts to encourage expression of that vision may be facilitated within groups that recognize and value differences as well as support the exercise of personal and organizational authority. Conversely, organizations that discourage open communication and participation can thwart an individual's ability to exercise or use her or his authority in groups. POSTMODERN AND FEMINIST CRITIQUES OF AUTHORITY Postmodern social theorists, such as Michel Foucault (1980), may have very different ways of understanding how social practices affect larger sociopolitical structures. For example, in positing the existence of localized, autonomous, noncentralized theoretical productions, which are neither dependent on nor in opposition to established regimes of knowledge, Foucault (1980) challenged traditional notions of repression and hierarchical supremacy. Instead, he pointed to the constant proliferation of critical discourses by those who have been traditionally disqualified from the construction of knowledge as proof that notions of repression are inadequate to an analysis of power. Foucault (1980) concluded that power is exercised and exists only in action. It is a relation of force, not one of repression. He pointed to the enduring existence of localized, critical discourses and the continuing warfare that exists in social institutions, language, and bodies, suggesting that “power is war, a war continued by other means” (p. 90). He identified democratic and Marxist schemas of power and contrasted political power with economic functionality, the latter referring to the role power plays in the simultaneous maintenance of the relations of production and of class domination. Foucault (1980, pp. 92–108) further considered the mechanisms of power in his second lecture. He examined the effects of truth produced by the delimitation of formal power and the functional relations of power that are revealed in the discourses on truth. In applying a historical analysis to the allocation of rights and legitimization of power from medieval times forward, Foucault contended that the discourses and techniques of sovereign rights have belied the brutality of domination that lie beneath such discourses. In outlining his methodological precautions, Foucault spoke of the necessity of discovering power as it is being exercised in institutions, in real and effective practices, and in all manners of the ways individuals are constructed as vehicles and articulators of power relations. In pursuing his emphasis on power as it is expressed through its discursive articulation, Foucault advocated an ascendant model of analysis, so that the localized exercise of power relations is seen as what becomes colonized by the large, global state system, what he called the great invention of bourgeois society. In emphasizing the integral mechanism of disciplinary power in addition to sovereign power, Foucault reminded us that the notion of repression itself emanates from a juridical-disciplinary realm, an example of the way political power can both forge ideological constructs and reappropriate and colonize the real social and cultural practices. That is, by experiencing what appears to be a dual prohibition and invitation for “subversive” and “oppositional” discourses, one may be seduced into thinking one is repressed. CONCLUSION More research is needed to study the ways that social workers are currently and actually exercising and using their authority in organizations and groups. The ideas of Foucault (1980) suggest that managed mental health care practices and policies will evolve to meet the wishes and needs of the general populace without social scientific intervention. According to Foucault's formulations, changes will occur naturally through the critical discourses of the public and without the meddlesome intervention of social science researchers. Conversely, the ideas of some feminist researchers and theorists (Bayes & Newton, 1978; Benjamin, 1988,) provide a convincing argument for the necessity of deliberately designing social scientific interventions to counteract culturally imported hierarchical status arrangements. Such interventions may be particularly necessary to address the needs of more marginalized and powerless groups in society. Discovering new ways to support the adaptation of empowerment approaches to organizational practices may lead to the creation of MCOs that promote socially just mental health care practices and policies that are consonant with the underlying values and ethical principles of professional social work practice. Providing ways to support organizational authority relations that recognize the mutuality and interdependence of both superiors and subordinates will likely lead to more socially responsible and humane managed mental health care organizations. REFERENCES Abramovitz, M. (1998). Social work and social reform: An arena of struggle. Social Work, 43, 512–526. Alderfer, C. P., & Smith, K. K. (1982). Studying intergroup relations embedded in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 27, 35–65. Barnard, C. (1938). The functions of the executive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bayes, M., & Newton, P. M. (1978). Women in authority. 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