I remember when I first decided I wanted to go to therapy. This was before I became a clinical social worker. I remember contacting my insurance to try to find someone, but it was unsuccessful. I remember the fear and sense of vulnerability. I remember that feeling being compounded by the difficulties of navigating insurance and my nervousness at making phone calls to clinics. And I remember not knowing who or what I was looking for. I also remember not knowing the meanings of the different professional acronyms. There were a bunch of different letters after the providers’ names, but I didn’t know what they meant. I just wanted someone to help me.
Before I became a social worker, I really had no idea what a social worker was, let alone the clump of letters “LCSW.” I thought social workers only worked in child welfare. Portrayals of social workers on TV and in movies often cast them as bad actors in characters’ lives. But, social work is actually a vast field, and it’s a wonderful one, at that! Social workers work in large organizations and government agencies, in communities, and on the individual and family levels as clinical social workers.
What is social work?
Social workers are bound by a unique code of ethics. Social workers’ primary goal, in whatever work they do, is to help people in need and address social problems. Our Code also states social workers will work against social injustice. Because larger social change and social justice are at the core of the social work profession, clinical social workers have a broad viewpoint when doing individual clinical work. Clinical social workers stand apart from other mental health professionals because we are trained to look at the whole context of an individual’s life, from the intrapsychic level, to family and community, all the way to the cultural, historical, political, and societal levels. This is what social workers call our “person-in-environment” perspective.
The many systems we live under
In previous work experiences, I had the privilege of supporting clients in navigating systems that make up their environments. Social work in community contexts often involves working on multiple levels simultaneously, within many systems. A social worker attends to a client’s personal social and emotional struggles – the individual level of support. At the same time, the social worker assists the client in wrangling with challenging, sometimes outright unjust, external systems. For example, a social worker may need to support a client who has anxiety about being in crowds wait in a cramped Social Security office, while also helping the client grapple with Social Security paperwork. Social workers gain valuable practical knowledge of these systems by working in positions out of the therapy room. These systems are everywhere – the hospital, the Medicaid and Medicare systems, the housing voucher lottery, the nursing home, the school, the prison, or any public benefit program. Social workers often accrue valuable knowledge about individuals’ rights within these systems by contending with them alongside their clients.
What is clinical social work?
Clinical social work is a subspecialty of social work in which the social worker “focuses on the assessment, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental illness, emotional, and other behavioral disturbances.” An elegant definition of the goal of clinical social work is the “enhancement and maintenance of physical, psychological (mental and emotional), social and spiritual well-being and functioning of individuals, families, small groups and communities” through the treatment of bio-psycho-social-spiritual dysfunction. In other words, doing psychotherapy – the talking cure. All social workers are trained to think outside of just what’s inside the client’s mind – what are the traumas, the family conditions, the societal, historical, political, and cultural conditions outside of the client’s mind and how are they affecting the client. This viewpoint underlays additional training on clinical work – the methods, theories, and practices that are applied within the therapy room to bring about growth, insight, and healing. So, when you are looking for someone to talk to and administer the talking cure, I hope this description of the field of social work helps flesh what that clump of letters “LCSW” means.