There is an important semantic distinction between social work and social care: the former implies taking action to bring about change or build on strengths; the latter implies the (ongoing) provision of services to meet the needs of those who are seen as unable to take charge of their lives for themselves. While we need to acknowledge that, at certain points through their journeys, people experiencing mental distress may require the care of others, the language of social care has been allowed to become dominant in defining the everyday practices of much of mental health social work. This has led to services being driven by an overwhelming concern with the ‘deficit’ aspects of people's lives in terms of illness, risk and incapacity, and an inability to recognise and develop people's assets and capabilities – which can be essential if we are to enable people to turn their lives around and recover from debilitating experiences of mental distress.

Currently, the immediate agendas that dominate social work practice are short-term and reactive – principally those of safeguarding and resource rationing. However, a policy response of recourse to evertighter eligibility criteria is likely to be counterproductive in relation to mental health. Instead of resources being made available to work with people when this may be most productive in terms of building capability and promoting recovery, involvement only becomes allowed at times when people are so distressed that social interventions may be of limited utility. In this way, people may easily become trapped into long-term dependency on potentially very expensive services if the support is not there at the right time for them to reclaim control over their lives with the support of those family and friends who may be important to them.

Assessment processes tend to be increasingly procedurally driven. They can be rushed, in terms of not allowing time to build up meaningful or collaborative relationships with service users and those around them, and in not treating them as ‘active citizens’ potentially capable of co-producing their own solutions (Needham and Carr, 2009). Instead, a disproportionate amount of both practitioner and managerial time has become devoted to bureaucratic processes, such as making and recording decisions that may be of little ‘real-world’ benefit to those whose lives are affected by mental distress.