What is Clinical Social Work?
CLINICAL SOCIAL WORK ASSOCIATION
Clinical Social Work Practice
Clinical social work practice encompasses four major areas: biopsychosocial assessment and diagnosis, social casework, counseling, biopsychosocial diagnosis and psychotherapy. Biopsychosocial Assessment and Diagnosis is the ability to understand the client holistically and use the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition, to conceptualize the symptoms and problems the client faces.
The next three areas are the ways that clinical social workers interact with clients to help them with internal and external difficulties. Social Casework provides therapeutic support to chronic mentally ill and/or emotionally-fragile clients and helping them access basic needs such as medication, housing, financing, and physical care. Counseling tends to focus on a shared reflection on the client’s day-to-day problems in the external world, and specific strategies for solving those problems. Psychotherapy is more internally oriented, designed to facilitate internal change through the examination of the client’s past and present experience, and how it gets expressed in the therapeutic relationship.
The practice of clinical social work requires the application of specialized clinical knowledge and advanced clinical skills in the areas of assessment, diagnosis and treatment of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders, and addictions. It is important to recognize that there are overlaps in the ways clinical social workers work in these practice areas, using their own experiences, intuition, and perceptions to help clients, depending on whether the client can benefit from a supportive relationship, an external focused relationship, or an insight-oriented relationship.
Code of Ethics
As a graduate level practitioner my conduct is guided by the National Association of Social Worker's Code of Ethics. The NASW Code of Ethics is intended to serve as a guide to the everyday professional conduct of social workers. This Code includes four sections. The first Section, "Preamble," summarizes the social work profession's mission and core values. The second section, "Purpose of the NASW Code of Ethics," provides an overview of the Code's main functions and a brief guide for dealing with ethical issues or dilemmas in social work practice. The third section, "Ethical Principles," presents broad ethical principles, based on social work's core values, that inform social work practice. The final section, "Ethical Standards," includes specific ethical standards to guide social workers' conduct and to provide a basis for adjudication.
CLICK HERE FOR A LINK TO THE FULL TEXT OF THE CODE OF ETHICS