Fields of social work practice: Mental illness

BY: CHE

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Mental health is another important area of social work profession. As the importance of mental health isn't still recognized enough in our society, social workers can provide some good help in this field.

One's mental health capacity for healthy social functioning are highly correlated. A person who is depressed, hallucinating, hyprtactive, or experiencing any symptoms of mental illness is likely to become a client of a social worker. 15% of the general population experience some form of emotional disturbance at least once. In this field of social work practice, the social workers are required to have higher level of education(Master's degree social work) in order to help the cilents with mental health problems. They help them to learn how to cope with problems in their lives and work to change or eliminate the negative factors that cause the problems at the same time.

There are three settings that social workers engage in this field. These include:

1. Out patient mental health clinic

Where social workers provide clinical ro theraputic services to individual and famlies or small groups of clients.

2. Inpatient psychiatric hospitals

Where social workers provide variety of treatment activities to the patients. They also connect the patients to the outside world, family and friends while they're in the hospital.

3. Private practice

Where social workers focus on individual and families' treatment. Small group intervention approaches may be used sometimes.

Fields of social work practice: Corrections/Criminal Justice

BY: CHE

Crime is a very serious problem in the world. Although its definition varies all around the world, problem=crime is not an exaggeration. Social workers can work in the fields of criminal justice and corrections.

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Criminal justice is another important expression of social work practice. Correctional social workers get employed at courts, parole and probation offices, and correctional facilities. This field of social work embraces offenders from all aspects of the society. They cover lots of services from the time of arrest to the person's release which includes counseling, crisis intervention and referral services.

This field is strongly related to the field of substance abuse. The United States hold 25% of the world's inmate population, and 85% of them meet the criteria for substance addiction or have met the criteria in the past. However, only 11% of them receive treatment in federal/state prisons and jails. The budget for prevention and treatment for addiction is very little(1.9 cents of every dollar) while the government spends 95.6% of that budget pays for the consequences of substance abuse, meaning that the government is using billions of dollars to clean up the mess rather than preventing the mess from happening. In such unfortunate situations, social workers can provide some help that the government couldn't really afford such as 12-setp programs AA(including group therapy), detox, behavioral counseling, medication, long-term follows up, and evaluation for correlating illness.

Just Relax!

BY: SAVANNAH 

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Studies show that in the United States people have longer days yet less vacation and relaxation time. Our work culture promotes the belief that practice and working long hours will in the end improve productivity. However, in today's hectic and insane world, overworking can create hurried, busy, multi-taskers that get too stressed out. Being a workaholic does not increase productivity and life satisfaction. It does just the opposite, so take a break and slow down with life. There is actual evidence that slowing down and doing absolutely nothing can actually improve productivity and increase lifelong happiness.

America has some of the longest work days. 134 other countries have laws abiding the length of work allowed per week. Of course the US does not.  85.8% of men and 66.5% of women work more than 40 hours a week. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers. Some conclude that the US has longer work hours because we want to have a high Gross Domestic Product (GDP). However, France and Germany both have a higher GDP ratio than the US. Both of those countries have a shorter work week than the US. North Korea which has a more insane work week than the US has a way lower GDP ratio than the US. That concludes that the amount of work per week does not necessarily contribute to the GDP ratio. Working longer hours causes more time to procrastinate, work less efficiently, and causes you to get less done.

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Manfred Ket De Vries, INSEAD Distinguished Professor of Leadership Development and Organizational Change argues that working harder is not working smarter. Setting time to the side to "do nothing" and "chill" creates the best time for the mind because it induces states of mind that nature imagination and improve our mental health. Having procrastination time does not mean that you are "wasting valuable time". We need time for our brains to rest and process information that we are learning and dealing with. Neuroscientists say that the brain, while doing one task, uses massive amounts of energy. About 20% of the body's energy intake is used just to do one task! That's a lot of energy. Enough for me to say I need a nap. Resting your neural networks help us process our experiences, consolidate memories, reinforce learning, regulate our attention and our emotions, and keep us productive and effective in our work and judgements. Thus overall making our mind at peace leaving room for happiness and creativity. 

Don't spend your entire life being a workaholic. Yes of course working is important, but your mental health is more important. Relax and take a deep breath in and out. A creative person is way more fun than a crazy person obsessed with work.

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https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201611/why-doing-nothing-improves-productivity-and-well-being

Fields of social work practice: Child Welfare

BY: CHE

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There are lots of fields in social work profession. One of them is child welfare. In this post, I'll explain what child welfare is and what kinds of different areas there are in child welfare. People may first think that social workers just take away the children from their parents. However, social workers actually do more than that for many different problems.

First, the protective service is a big part of child welfare. Around 825,000+ cases of child maltreatment are reported in the United States each year, 56% are classified as neglect. 21% of that percentage are related to physical abuse. Some vocabulary study here: Abuse is a word used more for active physical, sexual, and emotional mistreatments. Neglect is a word used for more passive mistreatment but can be just as damaging, such as inadequate food and shelter, unwholesome conditions, failure to have the child attend school, or inadequate provision of medical care. When a referral is received, the social worker must determine if the child is in immediate danger, assess the ability of the parents to resolve the problem, and make a judgment about the risks of working with the family while keeping the child in the home. The court approves the removal of the child from the home if necessary. Social workers then work with the family to help them eliminate the difficulties that led to the referral.

Foster care, another big part of child welfare, is required in some situations whether it is temporary or long-term. For example, when children need to be removed from their own home, but if it's not possible, or desirable to permanently sever their relationship with their biological parents. The foster care process is a careful assessment and plan whereby the child can return home if conditions improve. Social workers are also responsible for monitoring the foster homes. Both federal and state laws discourage removing children from their families. 513,000 children were living in foster care in 2005. Very sad.

Lastly, I will talk about residential care.  It's a group of home or residential treatment centers for children who show antisocial behavior or need intensive treatment to change that may cause problems for her/himself or for others. Social workers' job is to select an appropriate residential care facility, which involves working with the child, the family, and often the courts.

Although I introduced only three areas of child welfare, there are a lot more in this field, but unfortunately, not many social workers work in this field compared to other fields. Child welfare is known among social workers as an especially harsh field because of the brutal mistreatments to little children, which can definitely be a big damage to social workers' mental health. This is the major reason why not a lot of social workers stay in this field.  I hope this post helped to get the glimpse of what child welfare is and how it works.



Source: textbook: Social Work- A profession of many faces.

Why Do We Have Emotions?

BY: SKYLLAR

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Emotion is a response of the whole organism, involving physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience. Many people experience emotions differently. Some people are extremely emotional, while other people may seem almost emotionless. There are six very common emotions; happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, and fear. When sitting in my psychology class last week, I learned about those six emotions, and I learned about a few different emotion theories. What I didn’t learn was why do people have emotions?

Many people think the answer to that question is very simple. Some people may say that emotions are what make us human, and make us who we are as individuals. They make us feel. In a sense, anyone who thinks that isn’t totally wrong. Emotions do make us feel things. For example, we label certain things as “good” emotions, while others are bad. Love and excitement are usually considered good, whereas sadness and anxiety are bad. This is because of the way they physically make us feel. In order to have emotions they need involve a mental state and a physiological state. The mental state is the cognitive label we use to describe how we feel. The physiological state is the associated physical sensations we feel in our body due to the emotion.

There is no right or wrong way to feel something. Everyone experiences emotions differently. There isn’t a certain way you’re supposed to feel based on certain situations either. Feelings also aren’t a weakness. Everybody experiences negative emotions at some point and expressing so doesn’t mean you’re weak, it simply means something is bothering you. Overall, emotions are extremely important. Emotions help motivate us, help us communicate with people, help communicate to ourselves what we do and do not like, and much more.

Gagnon, Danny, and -. "Why Do We Have Emotions?" WHY DO WE HAVE EMOTIONS?(n.d.): n. pag. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.

Prompt 4

BY: MELISSA

I found a blog related to my field of study, psychology, where there are many different, and may I say random, posts about topics such as “10 Lazy Ways to Appear Smarter” or “6 Purely Psychological Effects of Washing Your Hands.” This blog may be one of the top rated psychology blogs rated on the internet but how do we know that it is a reliable source of information if it is written in a blog? My first reaction to this site would be that it is a very unreliable source because of the types of articles found and the set up of the home page. But as I dug deeper I found the “About PsyBlog” page and discovered that this blog is founded and run by a Dr. Jeremy Dean, a psychologist with a degree in law and three more degrees in psychology, the latest being a doctorate. 

On the other note, I decided to find a scholarly article in the field of psychology as well. The one I found was published in September 2013 called “Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach” I read about the study where they took 75,000 words and phrases from social media statuses and messages and proceeded to find lots of differences in categories pertaining to personality, gender, and age. This article was co-written by eleven authors who attended a variety of prestigious universities, some including the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge.

This study is mainly focused around social media. It is not an unknown fact that Facebook and Twitter are very popular social media sites, but did you know that they are widely used by more than 1/7^th of the world’s population? Through these two examples of social media, people act, talk, and react uniquely through what they publicly post. The authors focus on these posts and how certain words or phrases in them can determine things such as gender, age, and personality. 

They concluded that status updates and tweet updates contain personal and emotional content. People are allowed to use any language they desire on these sites which psychologists believe show characteristics of their unspoken feelings and concerns. At the end of the article an important point is brought up stating, “ Under different contexts, it is likely some results would differ. Still, the sample sizes and availability of demographic information afforded by social media bring us closer to a more ideal representative sample (Personality 14).” This is a disclosure saying that the study did not include every post ever posted on Facebook or Twitter and how the sample size of this study brought us closer to that conclusion. 

In conclusion, there are many reasons that both the blog and the scholarly article are credible. The first being that the blog has a psychologist with a doctorate running it, while the scholarly article has multiple credible authors co-writing it. The blog is very visually appealing and catches the eye while the scholarly article looks very boring and is 16 pages long. But I have concluded that both sources supply valid information in the field of psychology even though they have very different styles of delivery.

"PsyBlog - OSC IB Blogs." OSC IB Blogs. N.p., 21 Nov. 2011. Web. 15 Nov. 2016. <http://blogs.osc-ib.com/2011/12/ib-teacher-blogs/dp_psychology/psyblog/>.

Donald Trump Elected President of the United States

BY: DWAYNE

Donald John Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States on Tuesday in a stunning culmination of an explosive, populist and polarizing campaign that took relentless aim at the institutions and long-held ideals of American democracy.

The surprise outcome, defying late polls that showed Hillary Clinton with a modest but persistent edge, threatened convulsions throughout the country and the world, where skeptics had watched with alarm as Mr. Trump’s unvarnished overtures to disillusioned voters took hold.

The triumph for Mr. Trump, 70, a real estate developer-turned-reality television star with no government experience, was a powerful rejection of the establishment forces that had assembled against him, from the world of business to government, and the consensus they had forged on everything from trade to immigration

The results amounted to a repudiation, not only of Mrs. Clinton, but of President Obama, whose legacy is suddenly imperiled. And it was a decisive demonstration of power by a largely overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters who felt that the promise of the United States had slipped their grasp amid decades of globalization and multiculturalism.

In my opinion Mr. Trump is not fit to lead the United States of America. It’s a sad day in America when a business man with no government experience gets elected over a person who been in their respected field since I was a baby. I will say this election was the first time when I honestly didn’t have a candidate to vote for. I didn’t want neither to win but I can live with Clinton over Trump any day. For me the hard part is having to deal the decision he will make as president after all ready expressing how racist he is towards minorities. I do feel though, as the citizens of America if we don’t stand behind him he will never have a chance to be successful and to me that’s not fair. Even though I don’t like Donald Trump we still have to give him a chance to proof himself. Please feel free to comment your opinion of share any information related to the topic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/us/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-president.html