Social Work Perspective within Mental Health - Essay Example

SOCIAL WORK PERSPECTIVE WITHIN MENTAL HEALTH Social Work Perspective within Mental Health Various health organizations addressmental health by offering professional mental healthcare through mental health nurses, psychiatrists, occupational therapists, psychologists, and social workers (Queensland Health 2009, p. 1). Indeed, addressing mental health requires collaborative efforts from different health professionals who perform distinct clinical and nursing roles in an organized, consultative, and coordinated manner. However, it is notable that these professionals share some fundamental duties within their specific discipline (Renouf & Meadows 2012, pp. 325-326). While some mental health professionals perform specialized tasks, others perform generic tasks leading to significant tensions and professional differences in addressing mental health (Lloyd, King, and McKenna 2004, p. 120). However, it is worth noting that these tensions and professional differences can be beneficial in performing generic roles (Renouf and Meadows 2012, p. 326). The theories that seek to defines a good health practice as well as variations in languages, principles, and concepts that seek to defines a good health practice jeopardizes interactions within the mental health professionals (Renouf & Meadows 2012, p. 328). As such, a team of mental health professionals should always seek to utilize their distinct knowledge, skills, and principles in an effective manner that guarantees quality and effective health care to mental health patients (Bland & Renouf 2001, p. 240). Various principles that relate to contemporary mental health issues and reforms influence actions aimed at addressing mental health. Notably, some of the popular mental health principles include participation, recovery, social inclusion, and evidence-based practice (EBP). Genuine partnership in decision-making can help health professionals to address the mental health principles in a confident and dependent way (Lloyd & King 2003, p. 181). Indeed, mental health professionals prioritize the collaborative involvement of patients, families, and health care givers in making medical decisions, developing, planning, delivering, and analysing mental health care (Queensland Health 2012, p. 1). Among the various mental health principles, the principle of participation stands out subject to its capacity to guarantee quality health care. It is also a consumer right. This principle coerces health care providers to be accountable to the patients and their families since they also participate in health care delivery. However, various factors like the scarcity of resources, professional staff attitudes, and professional differences limit the patient and caregiver’s participation in mental health delivery. In some cases, the health professionals may refuse to collaborate with consumers and carers because of prejudice or paternalism (Lloyd & King 2003, pp. 180-182). Moreover, this practice is complex and time consuming thus forcing some medical professionals to desist from participating (Lloyd & King 2003, pp. 180-182). Nevertheless, effective participation derives positive results. On the other hand, the radical recovery principle focuses on the patients and caregiver’s medical experience and disregards ancient medical model (Bland, Renouf & Tullgren 2009, p. 43). From a consumer perspective, the recovery principle relates to a return to a meaningful life free of the impacts of our mental un-wellness (Byrne 2010). This principle focuses on how mental health patients recovered and assumed normal life (Byrne 2010, p. 1). In this case, the medical history does not determine the current lives of former victims. As such, this principle represents and offers hope to both the current patients and caregivers. Specific elements influence for individual recovery. These elements include hope, personal responsibility, discovery, connectedness, and an active sense of self (Queensland Health 2005). On the other hand, the EBP principle requires mental health professionals to rely on the best available scientific and medical evidence, information, and professionalism. As such, mental health professionals analyse multiple sources to derive the most effective evidence relating to mental health. Consequently, they analyse the derived evidence and apply it in mental health with an aim of evaluating the possible results (Queensland Health 2012, p. 4). Subject to its dominance in mental health, social workers must incorporate the EBP principle in their health practice (Bland, Renouf, and Tullgren 2009, pp. 41-42). It is worth noting that there is tension between practice based on the lived experience of recovery, and EBP principle (Renouf and Tullgren, 2009, p. 47). Indeed, most medical and clinical health professionals prefer relying on the EBP principle (Queensland Health 2012). Indeed, research confirms that stakeholders in the health industry disregard social workers who ignore EBP (Renouf & Bland 2005, p. 426). This leads to significant tension in health practice and social work within mental health care delivery. There is a correlation between patient experience to the social context and impact of mental problems as established by social inclusion (Bland, Renouf & Tullgren 2009). Indeed, social inclusion helps in promoting the well-being of individuals by allowing them to access employment, education, accommodation, family and social relationships, health care, and safety (Bland, Renouf & Tullgren 2009). With social inclusion, we can be able to reinforce mental health care by making a responsibility of the society (Bland, Renouf & Tullgren 2009, pp. 58-59). This follows from the fact that mental health patients suffer from stigma and segregation that leads to social exclusion, which jeopardizes the well-being of the patients. In this context, we can characterize social work practice within mental health as clinical or critical. Notably, the clinical approach relates to the use of a risk-assessment and EBP principle to make a diagnosis and treat a patient (Bland, Renouf & Tullgren 2009, pp. 13-14). With reference to mental health, the clinical approach relates to a biomedical construction of psychological distress that establishes the cause of disease as a biochemical imbalance in the brain (Morely 2003, p. 66). On the other hand, the critical approach relates to a structural understanding of mental illness, with a critique of psychiatry, unequal power relations and inequality, and an emphasis on consumer rights (Bland, Renouf & Tullgren 2009, pp. 13-14). While comparing the two approaches, we can establish that the critical approach is the most effective for social work in mental health since it promotes social works political objective by allowing social workers to seek social change and social justice (Morley 2003, p. 65). However, certain scholars disregard the argument for an exclusively critical approach to mental health social work and advocate for a combination of the two approaches to mental health social work by arguing that we can only understand the two approaches better by considering them as incompatible concepts (Bland, Renouf and Tullgren 2009, pp. 13-14). An exclusive critical perspective will only segregate social work in the mental health while both perspectives enhance mental health practice and promote professional relevance (Bland, Renouf & Tullgren 2009, pp. 12-16). This will allow social work to locate a patient, promote recovery and individual, family and community wellbeing while pursuing social justice (AASW 2008, p. 8). Indeed, a social worker bears the mandate of identifying opportunities for enhanced social and economic participation and overcoming segregation while seeking justice for the mentally ill (AASW (2012, p. 1). Social workers play a fundamental role in mental health where they assume the responsibility of understanding that the social environment influences health care on mental illness. Ideally, social work focuses on the potential, strength, class, ethnicity, gender, and cultures that influence health care on mental illness (AASW 2008, pp. 8-9). As such, social workers seek to promote the personality, confidence, interpersonal functioning and relationships as well as other motivators of mental health (AASW 2008, p. 8). Indeed, mental health victims suffer from social consequences that influence their personality, confidence, interpersonal relationships, and well-being (AASW 2008, pp. 8-9). They also encounter stigma and segregation from healthcare professionals (AASW 2012, pp. 5-6). Ideally, the stigma and segregation derives other adverse social effects like disintegration, oppression, and discrimination (Smith 2002, p. 317). The society considers the mentally ill as potentially violent, dangerous, unpredictable people who cannot sustain any relationship. Such prejudice prevents the mentally ill to seek medical assistance and forces them to go into social isolation due to the derived humiliation and low self-esteem. However, by normalising mental illness and advocating for the rights of people with a mental illness to ‘equal access to health care, housing, employment and justice,’ social workers can avert this social problem (Smith 2002, p. 318). To achieve social justice, mental health victims must have access to affordable health care and enjoy societal benefits (AASW 2010, p. 46). Bibliography Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) 2008, AASW practice standards for mental health social workers, 2nd edn, viewed 23 September 2014, http://www.aasw.asn.au/document/item/17 Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) 2010, Code of ethics, viewed 23 September 2014, http://www.aasw.asn.au/document/item/740 Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) 2012, Social work and mental health position paper, viewed 23 September 2014, http://www.aasw.asn.au/document/item/3284 Bland, R & Renouf, N 2001, ‘Social work and the mental health team’, Australian Psychiatry, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 238-241. Bland, R 2012, ‘The social worker’, in G Meadows, J Farhall, E Fossey, M Grigg, F McDermott & B Singh (eds), Mental health in Australia: collaborative community practice, 3rd edn, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne. Bland, R, Renouf, N & Tullgren, A 2009, Social work practice in mental health an introduction, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest. Byrne, L 2008, A consumer perspective on stigma, viewed 23 September 2014, Online Moodle Course, Term 2 2013, SOWK13012 Professional practice and mental health, CQUniversity. Byrne, L 2010, Recovery – a consumer perspective on applying recovery concepts, viewed 23 September 2014, Online Moodle Course, Term 2 2013, SOWK13012 Professional practice and mental health, CQUniversity. Lloyd, C & King, R 2003, ‘Consumer and carer participation in mental health services’, Australasian Psychiatry, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 180-184. 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Renouf, N & Meadows, G 2012, ‘Working collaboratively in teams’, in G Meadows, J Farhall, E Fossey, M Grigg, F McDermott & B Singh (eds), Mental health in Australia: collaborative community practice, 3rd edn, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne. Smith, M 2002, ‘Stigma’, Advances in Psychiatric Treatment, vol. 8, pp. 317-325. Read More