How Do Social Workers Help People With Addiction?
INTRODUCTION
Persons with addiction remain one of the major groups that the social workers encounter frequently. Social workers play instrumental roles in helping individuals, families, educational institutions, workplaces and communities to address addictions. Addiction affects people from diverse backgrounds, and helping professionals in virtually every area of practice encounter people with these problems. This essay discusses addiction in generic terms, and the methods that social workers can employ to address addiction-related cases. The first section entails a brief introduction as outlined above. The second section occasions an overview of addiction. The third section would briefly discuss some methods employed by social workers to help people with addiction. The final section presents a summary of the issues discussed and the author’s conclusion.
THE CONCEPT OF ADDICTION; an Overview.
The concept of addiction itself remains a “troubled spot” in intellectual discourse in respect of attaining a standardised and universal definition as noted by Goodman (1990). Helping professionals often argue as to what actually constitutes addiction whilst the general public employ the term to describe compulsive behaviour or any impulse-control disorder (DiNitto and …show more content…
Social workers may help a client affirm his/her position towards making a change by taking clients through a basic assessment session. This would involve asking the clients the “hard questions”, such as the readiness of the client to change his/her ways of dealing with stress, friends and contemporaries, leisure activities and the client’s way of thinking about himself/herself. This represents the first and the most important step before the process to change begins. It is always useful to agree with the client on how the decisions taken at this stage would be
Persons with addiction remain one of the major groups that the social workers encounter frequently. Social workers play instrumental roles in helping individuals, families, educational institutions, workplaces and communities to address addictions. Addiction affects people from diverse backgrounds, and helping professionals in virtually every area of practice encounter people with these problems. This essay discusses addiction in generic terms, and the methods that social workers can employ to address addiction-related cases. The first section entails a brief introduction as outlined above. The second section occasions an overview of addiction. The third section would briefly discuss some methods employed by social workers to help people with addiction. The final section presents a summary of the issues discussed and the author’s conclusion.
THE CONCEPT OF ADDICTION; an Overview.
The concept of addiction itself remains a “troubled spot” in intellectual discourse in respect of attaining a standardised and universal definition as noted by Goodman (1990). Helping professionals often argue as to what actually constitutes addiction whilst the general public employ the term to describe compulsive behaviour or any impulse-control disorder (DiNitto and …show more content…
Social workers may help a client affirm his/her position towards making a change by taking clients through a basic assessment session. This would involve asking the clients the “hard questions”, such as the readiness of the client to change his/her ways of dealing with stress, friends and contemporaries, leisure activities and the client’s way of thinking about himself/herself. This represents the first and the most important step before the process to change begins. It is always useful to agree with the client on how the decisions taken at this stage would be