Social psychiatry and social work.

Abstract

For the purpose of this discussion, ‘social psychiatry’ is defined as an attitude or a perspective; its activity or services is ‘community mental health’. The social work methods, casework, group-work, and community organization, will be considered as contributors to community mental health. Social work is an ideological forerunner of social psychiatry; the notion of the interdependence of psychic and social factors as determinants of human behaviour. Claims of exclusivity in community mental health made by psychiatry are being questioned by psychiatrists themselves. Social work can participate in providing community mental health services through its traditional methods regardless of category of client, and in contributing a better understanding of some of the social determinants of mental illness through research. With the chronic mental patient in the realm of rehabilitation and provision, with the ambulatory patient, social work's goal would be rehabilitation and provision, but in addition, there would be secondary prevention. With the ‘mental illness prone’, social work through its traditional methods makes but a minimal contribution, The goal being primarily preventive. Contribution is being made through formal and informal consultative activities with related professions in places where the target population can be reached. The role of social work can be enhanced if new developments bear fruit. At times society is the patient and the intervention should be directed at the reduction or elimination of the social pathologies and at the malfunctioning of our social systems. Social work thus might intervene in the social structure through the creation of new services and the more effective delivery of these services, the designing of new policies and programs in social welfare, the participation in urban planning and urban renewal and the participation in the creation of change in the ‘culture’ of society. The problems which remain involved are the functional differentiation among the several mental health professions, the deployment and interrelationships of professional and sub-professional personnel in social welfare and the implication for professional education. In conclusion the following questions are raised: what societal problems cause what categories of the population to be more prone to mental illness and emotional upheaval. Are we correct in placing under the rubric ‘mental illness’ some of the by-products of our urban highly technological civilization and would interdisciplinary epidemological research coupled with experimental intervention programs be appropriate to obtain answers to questions such as the ones posed above?