Search results for ‘Subject term:"mental health problems"’ Sort:
Results 1 - 2 of 2
In the hyphen: perceptions, benefits, and challenges of social workers’ dual identity as clinician-client
- Author:
- PROBST Barbara
- Journal article citation:
- Families in Society, 95(1), 2014, pp.25-33.
- Publisher:
- The Alliance for Children and Families
This study is the first to directly inquire into the experience of clinical social workers who live “in the hyphen,” having received psychiatric diagnoses and/or been in therapy themselves. Rather than inhabiting these roles sequentially as previous studies suggest, many inhabit them simultaneously. Social workers who took part in this qualitative thematic analysis describe the benefits of living in the hyphen, such as greater understanding of client resistance and opportunity to serve as a model of realistic hope, as well as its challenges, including countertransference, retraumatization, and fear of being “outed.” Overall, the experience of “sitting in the other chair” was more important to participants than having a skillful therapist as a role model or sharing a specific diagnostic history with a client, which they cautioned did not offer a shortcut to authentic understanding or formation of a therapeutic alliance (Publisher abstract)
Diagnosing, diagnoses, and the DSM in clinical social work
- Author:
- PROBST Barbara
- Journal article citation:
- Families in Society, 93(4), October 2012, pp.255-263.
- Publisher:
- The Alliance for Children and Families
Using data collected within a larger study, this article presents findings about how clinical social workers think about and use diagnoses deriving from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and differential use of diagnostic categories. The US-based qualitative study gathered information from a sample of 30 clinical social workers in Westchester County who took part in face-to-face interviews. The article describes the methodology and the results of thematic analysis of the interviews. It discusses the findings, covering 7 specific themes: diagnosis can provide useful indications for treatment decisions, the importance of a diagnosis depends on the disorder, diagnoses can be affected by preference for a familiar or popular category, clinical social workers prefer to select the mildest diagnosis available, diagnosis is more problematic for children than for adults, experience changes attitudes towards and use of DSM categories, and DSM categories are not exact so choice can be a struggle. It reports that participants distinguished between thinking diagnostically and using the DSM, and considered symptoms a more useful analytic focus than psychiatric categories.