The theme introducing our last Editorial—the voice of the service user—is pre-eminent in social work today. In this issue, we suggest that—laudable as its intentions are—it sets up a false dichotomy that is unsustainable in contemporary social work. To speak of ‘professionals’ and ‘services users’ as separate groups ignores the fact that in the contemporary world of an ageing population with overlapping health and social care needs; a world where complex and reconstituted families are the norm; and a context of greater openness about personal sexual orientation, mental health problems and experiences of trauma or abuse; the divide between the experiences of those who provide services and those who receive them, is increasingly blurred. This is potentially confusing for social workers trained in an era where it was important to keep one’s personal feelings in check for fear of subjectivity and transference but no less so for those taught to regard ‘experts by experience’ as being persons other than oneself. We do not seek here to suggest that it is alright to disregard the bias and skewing that may be introduced by a professional who unconsciously assumes their own experience to be that of the person whose situation they are required to assess, but rather to encourage social workers to validate their personal experience and integrate it with professional expertise into practice understandings that are mutually enhanced by that very special combination of professional and personal knowledge.
from The British Journal of Social Work Current Issue https://ift.tt/2O3xmLi
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