Mental Health Social Work Re Imagined

Taking a critical and radical approach, this text calls for a return to mental health social work that has personal relationships and an emotional connection between workers and those experiencing distress at its core. The optimism that underpinned the development of community care policies has dissipated to be replaced by a form of bleak managerialism. Neoliberalism has added stress to services already under great pressure and created a danger that we could revert to institutional forms of care. This much-needed work argues that the original progressive values of community care policies need to be rediscovered, updated and reinvigorated to provide a basis for a mental health social work that returns to fundamental notions of dignity and citizenship.