The Place of Occupational Therapy in Social Work Planning

Abstract

In attempting to lay before you some suggestions as to the place of occupational therapy in a social work programme, I realize that I am stepping beyond the generally familiar concept of occupational therapy as any activity or occupation used for remedial purposes and entering upon the little explored field of therapeutic occupation as a preventive measure. To-day, emerging as we are from the prolonged and wide-spread depression that the world has known, the words of Galen the Greek philosopher, spoken in A.D. 172, have come to have particular significance to us: Employment, he said, nature's best physician, and essential to human happiness. Modern society is organized on an occupational basis, it is the occupation of the individual which gives him a feeling of independence, and at the same time binds him to society. Occupation is the point of contact at which occupational therapy and social work should join forces in a programme of social and economic re-organization. Assuming that you have a general knowledge of the main principles and objectives of occupational therapy as applied to the hospital patient, I will stress two less familiar but equally important aspects of the work, the further development of which would be of undoubted social benefit: first, a programme of preventive work in the community, and second, the extension of therapeutic treatment beyond the hospital through the medium of the out-patient department, and of community wide follow-up work as already evidenced in general hospital work, in the mental health clinics, and in the after-care of the tuberculous patient. Much has been written on the subject of the use of the new leisure time, which we are assured will be ours following the continued discoveries of science. We have been advised to develop hobbies, to seek higher education, to learn to play, but Miss Joanna Colcord, writing in The Family, strikes a more practical note when she declares that most of us need to feel a direct relation between our activities and our standard of living.... With leisure on our hands, industrious American people are going to use some part of it to produce things that the family can use. . . . There exists in our midst not only native ingenuity but skill handed down through generations. Our settlements do provide in some measure an outlet for creative ability, but we are still very definitely limited in what we are able to offer to the adult, and much needs to be done to provide facilities whereby the real spontaneous