So, this idea has been brewing in my head for a long time. I have been a social worker for about 1.5 years since my graduation. If you count the time where I still did mental health work beforehand (but planned to be a psychologist), I guess that about totals to 4-5 years.
This whole thing started out because I couldn't succinctly explain to someone how I thought. I could win people over on individual points--like how minimum wage laws disenfranchise those of low-income--but it was hard to give them that kind of over-arching narrative of where I'm coming from.
This is my first attempt to really flesh out my ideas in full, so please, bare with me.
I am starting this blog to build on thought not generally introduced into the minds of young social workers. My education in social work was difficult to swallow, as almost all of the theories and approaches to problems were top-down solutions. They were essentially classes on how to best control those social problems that people experience. Lost on my teachers and the theorists was that underneath the statistics, there were actually individual people living lives, making meaning out of social problems, coping with them in fantastically brilliant ways, and blazing a path forward that no one from on-high could possibly imagine.
Although most social workers would consider themselves humanists, they are not. By nature, they are humanists, concerned as they are for the welfare of their clients. This is a prerequisite. Otherwise, you are mere a bureaucrat, a paper-pusher, or a simp waiting it out for another job.
But the approach to modern social work is so focused on social control, that those who practice it are unable to grasp the vulgar morality that underlies it. What people in social work fail to appreciate that it is not metrics of certain groups that matter! It is individual liberation that is important. Both intra-psychic liberation from mental health problems (or to use the Szasz framing, "problems in coping") as well as liberation from social control. This needs to be the aim of social work. And it is this idea that I need to flesh out.
Social workers generally see the system as terrible. They see people who are disenfranchised, screwed over at every turn, and uncared for by our social safety net. People who are controlled by the system appreciate the degradation inherent in the system and naturally rebel against it (or begrudgingly accede to it in the hopes they find a human on the other end--someone caring). Taxpayers (in the Wire-ian sense), that is to say "normal people," see those who receive services as being taken care of--at least as best as society knows how. However, they too appreciate, to a much smaller level to be sure, the problems inherent in the system. But that just means that the social safety net needs to be made better, with more centralized control, with more of the latest research, metrics, and theory to better tell the lowly individual worker what to do. What they fail to understand, and what social workers can often miss from under the pile of paperwork, is that what is needed is for real human help to again become a part of our lives.
I guess that wasn't succinct at all. Actually, it didn't even explain half of what I wanted. I guess what I'm trying to hammer out here is that social work, to be moral and effective, must come from the bottom-up. It must take a subjective view to subjective problems. It must focus on individual liberation and autonomy. It must, to be fair, be everything it is not.
