Volume 53, Issue 3, April 2023

This autoethnographic article reflects on how social and psychiatric structures may affect people’s credibility linked to memory disabilities due to electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). I highlight, through my own experiences of the treatment and by being a PhD student within the practice of social work, various aggravating and helping factors that are important in the encounter with memory-impaired people. Particular aspects of recovery, narration, perspectives on disabilities and power are essential when analysing one’s own experiences. A significant conclusion is that professionals in social work and psychiatry need to legitimise experiences and narratives in order to avoid deteriorating mental health, social exclusion and discrimination. It is also equally important to promote recovery and alternative identities through narration, both at the individual and societal level, as narration is described as an indispensable foundation in mental health recovery. Also, showing humility in the face of people’s life experiences, as well as facilitating epistemic justice, is essential within the fields of social and psychiatric work.

This scoping review looks at service user experiences of ‘avoidable harm’ in mental health social care (MHSC). It was carried out by researchers who have used mental health services.

By ‘avoidable harm’ we mean harm to service users from bad or unsafe services and support, which could have been prevented.

We know what policymakers and professionals think about ‘avoidable harm’ but we do not know what MHSC service users have experienced, so this review looks at what the literature says about their experiences.

The researchers first found 3,529 papers and after deciding which ones were right for the review, they were left with twenty-two papers. After reading the papers they found that these things could cause ‘avoidable harm’:

• Poor relationships and communication with practitioners

• Service users not having enough information and being left out of decisions

• A lack of support or support that does not meet a person’s needs

• Systems that are not flexible and administration that is a difficult burden

• Services and support that do not join up properly

• Cultures where service users feel powerless and discriminated against

They also found out that social and psychological ‘avoidable harm’ can include stress, distress, fear, being powerless and worsening of mental health problems.

Life Story Work (LSW) is where a trusted adult or trained professional goes through a young person’s record of their life with the young person. This intervention is used primarily with children and young people who have been removed from their birth families. The aim of LSW is to help produce a coherent life narrative with the young person. This article discusses on two models of LSW. It goes through the strengths and weaknesses of each model based on the research and experiences of the author, then goes on to provide an in-depth case study into the author’s own experience of LSW with the intention of inspiring further research into this intervention. From the author’s experiences, it could be concluded that there should be no ‘one size fits all’ approach to LSW, and research into this intervention might be directed by looking at therapeutic versions of LSW and comparing these to non-therapeutic models.

In this article, three people who have attended different special education schools, henceforth special schools, talk about their experiences of this. They attended special schools for significant periods of time between the 1980s and 2010s, and so they provide a good way to see whether attitudes in special schools changed over that time. Reading the accounts, it becomes clear that whilst all three individuals had positive experiences of special schools whilst they attended there, the recurring longer-term reflection of all three individuals is that they did not think that the special schools provided them with a good level of education, and particularly that the special schools did not prepare them properly for a life outside of the special school and in work. All individuals see this as a long-term negative impact of attending special schools. The use of special schools is increasing, with the use of Education Health and Care plans. The article suggests that in light of the experiences presented above, social workers need to consider whether special schools are relevant to meeting the aims of social work practice of ensuring that service users are not discriminated against or excluded from society.

This article describes a project aimed at improving how out-of-home care caseworkers work with the child’s carers (foster or kinship carers, guardians or adoptive parents) and relatives family (parents, sibling, grandparents and others) so that the child can have visits with family and their carers and relatives can get along for the sake of the child. People who have personally experienced the out-of-home care system worked with researchers to design research and communication tools. In particular, two young people who grew up in care describe visits with their families and how these experiences made them want to be involved in research that helps other young people. They used their experiences to create books for young and older children about their rights to see family members and how to get support if they feel unsafe. These books and other resources created by the project are being used by caseworkers and people involved in the out-of-home care system. Together, the young people and the researchers describe how they combined practical first-hand experience with research and theory for better information for caseworkers.

In this article, by sharing his lived experiences of caring for his grandmother and by reflecting on them, the author exposes the serious issues of abuse and neglect of elderly people, the need for the transfer of caring technology at the local level and the necessity of commitment to sustaining caring and of innovations in human caring. It suggests implications for the best interests of elderly people and integrates reason and emotion in caring. It argues that caring is an asymmetrical phenomenon in our societies, and we can do better. If we do not create opportunities and incentives to develop caring practices and do not contribute to creating caring communities, we shall not only allow our practice to leave much to be desired, but also may find a deep sense of emptiness in social work and social workers’ hearts.

This article outlines the final phase of a two-year exploratory research project focused on understanding what supports the meaningful and sustainable involvement of people with lived experience (service participants) in social work education across an East of England Higher Education Institution and a Local Authority. This part of the project was co-produced with lived experience co-researchers. The research found that a role dedicated to supporting service participants was key. Opportunities to shape diverse learning experiences, and power sharing were also important. This was alongside, collective, respectful, mutually supportive relationships and practical resources, such as shared financial investment, all of which have the potential to change culture. Together, these principles, practices and values can create meaningful and sustainable lived experience involvement within social work education.

Dominant understandings of professional boundaries involve an immutable separation of the personal/professional that must be upheld by workers. This separation is an ongoing source of tension within social work research and practice. We contribute to pre-existing work unsettling this divide by drawing together peer support worker experiences and practices, as both service users and workers, with post-humanist thinking, to think critically about boundary practices. We highlight the potentially harmful effects for service users of a personal/professional divide, as well as the emancipatory potential of personal/professional ‘messiness’. Rather than seeing such ‘messiness’ as workers crossing professional boundaries, we propose understanding such events as involving alternative boundaries enacted through interactions of socio-material forces (bodies, discourses, objects, places, emotions). We recommend changes to social work to support boundary understandings and practices as multiple and relational, enabling connection and mutuality. We also recommend further research to explore the diversity of boundary practices and effects for service users and workers, drawing on both lived experience and post-humanist approaches.

Therapeutic boarding schools (TBS) in the USA are residential programmes that seek to reform teenagers perceived as having mental health and/or substance misuse problems. The article aims to provide insight into two LGBTQ+ former students’ experience of conversion therapy inside these programmes. The case studies are based on interviews conducted with former TBS students. The research was undertaken from a survivor–researcher approach and was conducted by a former TBS student with former students. The case studies illuminate two forms of conversion therapy: overt and covert. Overt conversion therapy occurred when a person in authority expressed the intention to change or suppress a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity or expression. Covert conversion therapy involved persistent pressure for such change and suppression, but where the intention of practitioners or organisations are not openly or explicitly to ‘convert’ LGBTQ+ people. Conversion therapy is discussed in the context of epistemic injustice and the potential harm caused when the insight of ‘troubled teens’ is routinely devalued. Participants described conversion therapy practices as having caused long-term psychological trauma. It is important for social workers to be able to identify a range of conversion practices and confront conversion ideology within our profession and within our communities.

Autistic mothers are much more likely to have autistic children. They may also be more likely to come to the attention of social services. Social workers have a lot of power in the lives of autistic families. Yet, research has so far failed to explore this topic. There is a lot of research about autistic people, but this is nearly all from the perspective of non-autistic researchers. I think that these issues should be researched by people who have experienced them. I have drawn on interviews with other autistic mothers of autistic children as well as my own, personal experiences to analyse how we experience social work intervention.

I found that social workers often misunderstand autistic mothers and autistic children. I found that autistic behaviours were often considered to be ‘perplexing’ and confusing. They were not fairly interpreted. Autistic mothers were not treated as experts in their own lives or the lives of their children. They faced lots of difficulties. In particular, they found going to school very hard. This was made worse by social services putting a lot of pressure on them to attend school, even though it made them upset. I finish by discussing how badly society treats people who are different in the way that they think, feel, understand, reason and sense.

The issue of institutional abuse (IA) of children outside the family often creates divisions and closures in the listener. Starting from the story of an Italian community in which the abuse and maltreatment involving more than eighty children were ascertained, this article integrates the contributions of reflection deriving from the experience of the main author, who as a child had been placed there and as an adult denounced it, with the international scientific literature and the results of participatory research. The aim is to prevent what happened from happening again. The difficulty of detecting what can happen to children outside the family is analysed by focusing on a number of themes: the phases of removal from the family, control and monitoring during the stay in the community, listening to minors, participation, difficulties during the exit phase, social prejudices and abandonment by institutions. Describing, analysing and contextualising this specific form of maltreatment are important to stimulate changes in thinking and action in the protection system and in individual professionals.

This article reports on a rapid scoping review of the literature covering the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The questions and process for the review were designed together by mental health family carers and researchers to understand the experiences, unmet needs and level of distress experienced by mental health family carers during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article is needed because although mental health family carers may have similar experiences to other carers, they also have experiences and needs that are unique based on the episodic and often unexpected events they encounter. The review identified the increased responsibilities and loss of services faced by carers and the impacts these have emotionally, financially, socially and practically. Specific groups were highlighted in the literature, and one article clearly outlines the challenges faced by young carers who are often a hidden population of carers. The article ends with suggestions on how social workers and other health care providers can support mental health family carers to be recognised and valued.

This is an autoethnographic account of a lifetime spent involved with the child protection system in Victoria Australia. The article is interesting by offering rare insights into the child protection system from my own various experiences. The primary focus of this article is to share the lived experience of a girl and later a woman, and the language, stereotypes and expectations which characterised the lived experience of life in child protection, first as a child who experienced out-of-home care and today as a child protection lawyer. Referring to my records, I discuss and highlight how recordkeeping practices and knowledge about children who have experienced out-of-home care fail the children they are designed to protect and do not accord with a child’s right to participate in critical decisions being made about them.

We are three researchers from Australia who live with disabilities and/or mental illnesses. We came together to write about and explore our experiences of power in different parts of our lives. We used a method called collaborative autoethnography, where our stories were the data for the research. We wrote and shared stories about power in our experiences with school, work and care services. We also wrote and shared stories about power in our personal relationships. From doing this we found that we had, at times, all felt dehumanised and voiceless in our interactions with school, work and services—we felt they had power over us. In contrast, we found that our personal relationships were more about trust and mutual respect—we shared power. From this research, we learned that our strength came from our own advocacy, perseverance and our caring relationships—these were sources of empowerment and helped us become confident and strong in our identities as people with disabilities and mental illnesses. Doing research in this collaborative way, where we were able to safely share our stories, was also a way to claim power.