Client quote of the day:

"Life is gay." --14 year-old girl

I think we should structure mental health like we do medicine: a heirarchy of different levels of education and experience. Those with less education have to be supervised by someone with more. A national board keeps tabs on everyone, and requires us to be meticulous and to stay up-to-date on current research.

Social workers would be like Physician Assistants. We know a lot, but there are, shall we say, gaps in our eduction. Case in point: I'm reading an article on working with Hispanic immigrants in schools, looking for ideas. The article repeats three times: "The school system is presented as a natural support agent that is psychologically, culturally and geographically accessible for the delivery of cuturally competent mental health services."

Social work textbooks LOVE sentences like that. We love lists of broad discriptive words that say almost nothing. We call our assessments "biopsychosocials." Ha! This is as specific as the article gets: "In particular, school-based clinicians must incorporate into their treatment of Hispanic immigrant children an understanding of how multiple socio-environmental factors interact with individual and family dynamics within a specific ethnic-cultural context."

COME ON!