Introduction

In common with other areas of practice, mental health social work can on occasions struggle to define its professional role, vision and contribution to services. The argument put forward that in mental health social work brings a uniquely valued focused approach (Gould, 2010) seems to me wholly inadequate and inaccurate. Social workers are not the only professionals with a value base. The social work value base is not without its critics or failings. I would argue that the role of social workers is to work alongside people with mental health problems and in so doing they can bring a social and community based perspective that a purely medical model lacks. Social work as a profession and discipline has social inclusion at its core. Social work practitioners seek to support social inclusion on both an individual and organisational level. The danger is that in the current political, organisational and economic climate these core contributions are lost. As Karban (2016) notes, there is a danger that mental health social work will be reduced to a bureaucratic exercise in risk assessment and risk management, rather than a dynamic relational form of practice.

Mental health social work in context

Mental health social work is concerned with challenging the individual and social barriers to full citizenship. The journey that Sayce (2016) described as being from ‘patient to citizen’ has some way to go despite the increased legal protections and changes in social attitudes. The potential for a new form of mental health social work that shakes of the shackles of manageralism is hinted at in some recent key policy documents: The role of the social worker in adult mental services (Allen, 2014), The knowledge and skills statements for social workers in adult services (DH, 2015) and Social work for better mental health (DH, 2016). All these policies emphasise the importance of co-production – that is, working with individuals and communities, not tokenism, and building community resources to prevent the development of mental health problems. There are concerns that co-production like the recovery model will lose its radical edge and become colonised by professionals to create a discourse that results ironically in the exclusion rather than the inclusion of service users.