CHAPTER 9 - Casework in the Psychiatric Setting

Abstract

This chapter discusses the ways in which authority inheres in the role and function of caseworkers in psychiatric setting. In discussing the position of the psychiatric social worker in the psychiatric hospital, Kay McDougall has asserted that she does not have any position of authority in the hospital. She has criticized those nurses in hospital who, wanting to become social workers, still wish to retain the authority of the nurse. Social work in a hospital, whether as a psychiatric social worker or a medical social worker, involves, except perhaps in those specialized hospitals run as therapeutic communities, a somewhat more tenuous, less closely integrated membership of the team than that enjoyed by the psychiatric social worker in much smaller, less complex, and bureaucratic child guidance clinic. The psychiatric social worker in the hospital shares team membership to an extent that is still denied to the medical social worker, but this is not the case in all psychiatric hospitals. In some hospitals, the psychiatric social worker's role is still confined to taking histories and she is not expected either to contribute toward the treatment of the patient or to take any part in the decision to discharge.