Social Work in Psychiatric Rehabilitation

Abstract

The potential contribution of social work to the rehabilitation of patients is such a broad topic that it is first necessary to locate within it those aspects which are discussed in the present paper. As will become clear, rehabilitation provides a particularly convenient focus for considering the relationship between psychiatrists and social workers as occupational groups, and our chief purpose is to discuss this relationship—which is currently vexing all concerned. We shall place ourselves in context by recalling at once that social work forms but a part of a wide range of welfare and personal social services. Even those local government departments which, in England and Wales, we rightly call Social Services Departments (less correctly known in Scotland as Social Work Departments) have functions wider than simply that of the delivery of social work. It is surely arguable that a perfectly imaginable change in public provision, such as a quadrupling of the financial benefits available to chronically handicapped patients and their families, might at a stroke do more for psychiatric rehabilitation than all the social work—or, for that matter, all the psychiatry—in the world.