Hi,
I'm a final year social work student and have got two job offers. One is social work with physically disabled adults, and the other is mental health social work. At the moment I am on placement in an older people's team.
I'm leaning towards the mental health option, because it would give me more hours, but my supervisor suspects that mental health is very stressful (though she hasn't worked in that area herself).
What does everyone think? Is mental health more stressful?
Thanks!
Mental health definitely! Physical disabilities teams have no rigid definition of their client group as the others do so you often end up with everybody that nobody else is willing to take on. In me experience you do not get the time you do in Mental heath to spend forming proper therapeutic relationships with clients. Just get in arrange care and on to the next one. Whole field being massively affected by personalisation. Sadly physical disability is seldom regarded as a serious speciality compared to mental health. Check the teams sick record as in my experience my PDI team had chronic unmanaged sickness absence of staff which added to the daily pressures.
It's not a case of one being more stressful than the other. MH is no more stressful than any other part of SW. As someone who has been a generic SW and worked in nearly all branches of SW, including child protection and as an asw/amhp, the stress isn't generally about the job but more about what you have to enable you to do the job. Sometimes just having good support/supervision is enough.
Visit both teams, if you have the chance, and see which feels better for you.
I work as a senio prac AMHP in the Mental Health field. Whilst all specialisms have their respective pressures, I love where I am at. For me, Children and families always sounded more stressful.
Make sure its adults under 65's if you want to practise therapeutic intervention,Older people's mental health is subjected to care Management proceedures and resources is scarce,very much a cinderella service.
yes yes yes adult mental health is the way to go, i love my job and am very passionate about it, you become the resource the work is always different and very hands on, yes there is paperwork but when i talk to my colleagues in more traditional social work team they seem to be snowed under with targets and paperwork.
Thanks for all your input everyone- it's really helpful to get an objective take on it. My instinct was that I would rather work in mental health and now I feel encouraged to follow that instinct and go with the mental health job.
Thanks again :)