Should Social Workers be educated on Schizophrenia?
Schizophrenics were deemed dysfunctional in the 1950’s and
the 1960’s, (Walsh, 1988) but today, because of research we know that
schizophrenia is caused by heredity, a lot of drug and alcohol use and
traumatic life experiences. The imbalance in a person’s mind is caused from
brain chemistry and neurotransmitters: dopamine, glutamate, and serotonin.
These neurotransmitters let the nerve cells in the brain to send messages to
each other. (MHA)
Information on schizophrenia is
scarce, especially in rural town America. Those people with schizophrenia are
pinned as deviant and dysfunctional. People like this used to be locked away
like a princess in a tower, waiting for someone to save them but it just
worsened their condition.
Social workers are slowly accessing
information that pertains to schizophrenia but there are a lot of unknown
things associated with it. They are getting more familiar with behavior
associated with childhood trauma, war, divorces, death, birth and even in court
settings but they are not mental health professionals who are trained to seek
out these specific behaviors.
Social workers are everywhere you
look today, they are advocates speaking to people in power about the onset of
mental illnesses associated with one’s life choices. They are on the ground
fighting a war they don’t understand fully.
Caretakers are usually underqualified family members or
group homes where they are left to their own discretion. The support and care
of a schizophrenic person requires reminders, grounding, reassurance,
productive hobbies, and activities. Neither family or social workers are
knowledgeable with experience and research is the only scare thing that helps
caregivers accomplish this task. People feel like schizophrenics should not be
integrated into society because they are not able to conform to societal
standards but with medication and rehabilitation assistance, they are able to
live long-productive lives.
“Stay to the right, you cannot
survive on the left” God said.
“The white cars
are your angels; the red cars are angered by your actions.”
These are some
things said to a person who was having a schizophrenic episodic event in 2016.
As you can tell, God did not actually say these things. Delusions,
hallucinations, voices, and visual presentations played for personal viewing
had overtaken their mind, and surely, they felt so incredibly real. This person
went on to lose custody of her child because she was not identified as someone
with mental illness such as schizophrenia. The Social worker had this person
relinquish her rights to her child and give them to a stranger while that
person went and became her foster mother and began court proceedings to keep
the mother’s right away from her.
Social
workers should be knowledgeable on the various types of mental illnesses so
that they can determine whether they should in fact take the person’s
child(ren) or refer them to the hospital and contact their next of kin. Social
workers should accompany the person instead of running through them as if they
were on a conveyer belt. Meeting the quota for the month should not constitute
a way to take someone’s child from them on the word of a stranger.
If Social workers were knowledgeable on
Schizophrenia, that person’s child would not have been taken from them and put
into foster care with a strange woman. Family trees associated with family
history of mental illnesses should be acknowledged and investigated deeper to
recognize the problems underlying the surface.
Social workers are best to be
described as people for the people and in this instance, it was not this way.
Schizophrenia is becoming more prevalent in society because of life choices and
should be noted by social workers to conclude with the best option possible.
Social workers
have been dealing with personal interactions with people who have mental health
issues with little to no information on schizophrenia to help them better
understand what precisely they were up against. Today, they are more informed
in a variety of mental illnesses and even have information out for public
viewing.
How one perceives themselves is
important in self-discovery and along that journey, self-worth is examined. How
we see ourselves is the perception of the world we see around us. “Our identities are a repository for much of what we
absorb in the world and are the filter through which our lived
experience is processed and interpreted.” (Bransen, 2012)
If you go through life despising the person who you have become,
then you will struggle with identifying who you are. A person with
schizophrenia has a very difficult time identifying who they are because of the
delusions and hallucinations they experience. They go through their day to day
stuck inside of their mind, trying to combat the chatter that echoes within.
Schizophrenia
affects approximately 24 million people or 1 in 300 people (0.32%)
worldwide.
(WHO) Social workers today are working on increasing the numbers of the number
of Social Workers there are in the field to accommodate for these numbers. After people begin realizing what it is that
social workers do, there should be a social worker assigned to every family to
help parents and family members cope with schizophrenia and other mental
illnesses.
We as a collective are becoming
more aware of what lies beneath the surface. Everyone has a story, people have
been traumatized and once we recognize the damage families and the environment has
on the effect of the quality of life of a person, we will begin to heal through
support services and seminars.
Opposing this argument would entail
that social workers have no business telling families what to do or how to
raise their children, but as history proves to us, people have problems identifying
and accepting people as they are. Why have a stranger come into your home and
order you and your family around to accommodate said person with schizophrenia?
Well, the answer is simple, you see, these patients are human, people with
feelings and emotions and should be cared for properly by their loved ones. Schizophrenic
patients are not able to care for themselves so how can they care for children
or another person? With the right medication, lives of schizophrenic patients
have improved a great deal.
In conclusion, Social workers
should be educated on Schizophrenia because they are an intricate part to
saving and piecing back together families or keeping them apart and since
schizophrenia is becoming more prevalent in today’s society they can better
help with people who need assistance instead of frowning upon them and
dismissing them into society without any concern.
Supplemental Paragraph:
I used shortened paragraphs to appeal to the younger
audience and their attention span. I used various slang from today and used a
few more pictures. I wrote in comparison of Vice which is less wordy and used
in the same layout of the Vice website.
Figure 1: Study finds reduced brain.
Figure 2: What is Schizophrenia?
Figure 3: Caregiver vs Caretaker
Figure 4: Child Support
Figure 5: Things I have learned in 300 posts
Figure 6: Puzzle Picture
Comments
Post a Comment