Introduction: Psychiatry and Social Work — Contention and Co-operation

Abstract

Little if anything that the helping professions do for their patients and clients takes place outside a context of the values, rules, opportunities and constraints of the contemporary social system. This is nowhere more evident than in the field of psychiatry, and any mental health worker who is unaware of it is potentially dangerous. Social workers do not of course have a monopoly of sensitivity to social and ethical issues, of healthy scepticism about the medicalisation of problems of living, or of concern as to whether psychiatric intervention may not sometimes be more noxious than what it seeks to cure. But it does seem that social workers bring to their work a special awareness of these issues, which can do much to enrich or temper the deliberations of all those who are professionally involved with the individual who is described as ‘mentally disordered’, and this client group as a whole. This introductory chapter begins with an overview of some key issues which often arise as opposite sides in a pro- versus anti-psychiatry debate. However, mental disorder and its treatment is too multifaceted a topic for black-and-white notions.