Mental Health and Disability Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Mental Health and Disability - demonstrate ExampleSocial work practice with those who were labeled insane in the parlance of the early twentieth century (individuals found to meet the legal translation of insanity at a lunacy tap hearing and committed to institutions), arose from a brotherlyly progressive reform effort known as the aftercare movement. As the earliest form of psychiatric social work practice, aftercare functions became the vehicle for linking the emerging methods and tasks of social work with the active structures of psychiatric care. That link proved to be an important one for widening the perspective on what constituted adequate care for people with the most serious mental illnesses, as well as for the definition and development of social works master turf.The rise of social work in public mental wellness through aftercare of people with serious mental illnesses illustrates the important reality that strengthening a profession takes browse by creating turf, not just defending it (Barnes and Mercer, 2006, 45-8). This perspective thrives in unstable and shifting circumstances when usual definitions and boundaries are in flux. It is a useful perspective for the social work profession to confront the fermentation and uncertainty currently experienced in human services (Campbell, 2000, 95).From the 1906 establishment of an aftercare committee with a atomic number 53 social work-trained aftercare agent at New Yorks Manhattan State Hospital to 1930 when U.S. census data reported social workers employed in state mental hospitals in half of the states in the country, social work became identify with the function of aftercare. The processes that established this identification illustrate critical connections between social activism for an idea and the creation of professional place. Such connections are important sources of professional legitimization through establishing what sociologist Andrew Abbott (1988) referred to as jurisdictional cla ims or assertions of specific colligate between a profession and its work (Barnes and Mercer, 2006,