After writing my first post back in the summer I then had a break but now I am back. I guess I felt as though I did not have anything interesting to say, but thanks to inspiration from Popeye's blog ( thanks popeye) i have decided to give it another go so please bare with me. ( is that the right sort of bare or should it be bear? I am not really sure).
I am on my third year and final placement and am due to qualify in June, it's very exciting but also quite nerve wracking being this close to my ambition especially when i read on the forum about students being useless. Anyway my placement is in a community mental health team in a rural area. I really like it but it is very challenging. For a while I was the only social worker on the team as my supervisor who is also the other social worker was away from work sick. Thankfully she is back now and has been able to quell some of my fears of feeling inadequate and deskilled. You see there is a lot of therapy going on in the team and although it has its values I also think social work can play a valuable role in the recovery of service users with mental health issues. I began to feel very inadequate as I couldn't do therapy and did not want to, I wanted to do social work but I started to feel that it was not enough or valued by the team, there is also a lot of third sector organisations that appear to be taking on what I imagined I would do as a student, things like financial and housing advice, support with finding meaningful activities, finding structures to people's days and working towards recovery. Also as the team had only had nursing or OT students before they did not know what I could do and I was not sure. now i intercept work before it goes to the tird sector organisations and my supervisor also bats stuff my way. I have started by meeting and building relationships with service users and hopefully walking alongside them in their journey to recovery.I am also co-facilitating a women's group which is a challenge in itself but i will talk more about these things in future posts.
What i wanted to write about today is therapies. In our team we have a Cognitive Analytical Therapist, a Soloution Focused Therapist and someone who does Dialetical Behaviour Therapy. Last week I went to a networking afternoon for people who wanted to know more about CAT, I was interested as i had read a little about it and wanted to know more. I was fascinated to find out that a lot of the tools used we use in social work like the Narrative approach, genograms, paying attentions to endings, transference, reciprocal roles and collaborative work with service users. This got me thinking as to me this is what we do as social workers anyway, isn't it? They were also talking about how we should be aware of the impact we have as a professional on the service user and the impact the service user can have on the worker, which to me is part of Anti-Oppressive practice. I then wondered why CAT therapists have to use words like reformulation and psychotherapy files, why can't therapists use terms that everyone understands , why does it seem to be so exclusive?
On the same theme a social worker said to me that Soloution Focused Therapy is to him just what we call Task Centered practice. I agree as isn't that what we do, try and find soloutions to people's problems in an empowering way?
Therapy is valuable to some people but it makes me wonder, is it more the therapeutic relationship that has the benefit than the actual therapy, after all spending an hour a week just focusing on you must be good if you have never had such dedicated input before. However the service user still has to go home at the end of it and face all those structural and personal issues that were impacting on their lives. In fact some service users find CAT therapy brings up things they would have rather left filed away in that filing cabinet inside and bringing them to the surface has in fact made things worse, one person has said that it has brought things up he can't get rid of and now they are a constant nagging reminder of how bad things were when he was a child. I also heard some one say that a service user can only have DBT if they are actively self harming, this service user has been told, alledgedly, that if she wants a chance of having contact with her child she needs to get treatment for her Borderline Personality Disorder which according to the NICE guidelines is DBT, however as she is not actively self harming at the moment she is not eligible for treament, what does that say? go and cut yourself then we can mend you.
anyhow that is probably enough for today. please come back again I promise this won't be the last. 