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

Mental Health and Disability - Essay ExampleSocial give way trust with those who were labeled insane in the parlance of the early 20th century (individuals found to meet the legal definition of insanity at a foolery court hearing and committed to institutions), arose from a sociablely 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 existing 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 psychic illnesses, as well as for the definition and development of social works professingal turf.The recrudesce of social work in public mental health through aftercare of people with serious mental illnesses illustrates the important reality that strengthening a profession takes place by creating turf, not just defending it (Barnes and Mercer, 2006, 45-8). This perspective thrives in unstable and shifting circumstances when prevailing definitions and boundaries are in flux. It is a utilizable perspective for the social work profession to confront the upheaval and uncertainty currently experienced in human services (Campbell, 2000, 95).From the 1906 establishment of an aftercare committee with a single 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 identified with the function of aftercare. The processes that established this identification illustrate critical connections between social activism for an idea and the existence of professional place. Such connections are important sources of professional legitimization through establishing what sociologist Andrew Abbott (1988) referred to as jurisdictional claims or assertions of specific links between a profession and its work (Barnes and Mercer, 2006,