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Exploring Opportunities for Critical Mental Health Social Work in Direct Practice: The Politics of Naming and Responding to Distress
Book chapter

Exploring Opportunities for Critical Mental Health Social Work in Direct Practice: The Politics of Naming and Responding to Distress

Louise Whitaker, Katherine Reid, Emma Tseris, Hollie Ballingall, Ashlea Borg, Binti Jones, Alex Olsen, Aimee Pitt and Lisa Thorpy
Social Work in the Mental Health Field: From Power Analysis to Practice, pp.39-53
SpringerBriefs in Social Work Series, Springer, 1st
02/2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-08306-7_3
Appears in  Recent Faculty of Health Publications

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Abstract

This chapter explores a range of ideas for how social workers can embody social justice values in the mental health field. It provides examples of direct practice that highlight how social workers navigate competing priorities and aim to work towards possibilities beyond biomedical and neoliberal paradigms. Relevant skills include listening to and exposing the politics of experience in the mental health system, making the socio-political contexts of people’s lives visible, identifying and naming experiences of violence and injustice, and developing more expansive understandings of ‘mental health’. From here, there are opportunities for elevating lived experience expertise, exercising epistemic humility, recognising White privilege, and learning from First Nations knowledges. This chapter also explores ways to attend to power in physical and relational spaces.

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