Contribution of Mental Health Social Worker and the

Approved Social Worker

The first qualified mental health social workers were employed in the UK in the 1920s with the first mental health social work training course in the United Kingdom beginning at the London School of Economics in 1929. The training was influenced by psychosocial explanations of mental distress. Social workers were employed in the community in child guidance clinics as well as psychiatric hospitals. At the time, hospital-based social workers were the only professional group of mental health workers to bridge both the hospital and community settings. Much of their work was

focussed on the assessment of family and social circumstances.

Even in the beginnings of the profession, mental health social workers had a clear identity grounded within an explicit value base. For example, in 1939 the Association of Psychiatric Social Workers turned down the suggestion from the British Medical Association to become registered as medical auxiliaries.

Social work as a profession grew rapidly throughout the post Second World War era along with the social policies to provide for a universal public welfare system.

The statutory powers contained within the Mental Health Act (1959) gave social workers a legal role in the compulsory detention of someone experiencing mental distress. These powers were later re-defined in the 1983 Act with the provision for Approved Social Workers (ASWs). The underlying principles of ASW work is to have specialist knowledge and skills needed in order to assess the person within their social and environmental contexts and to identify the least restrictive alternatives to compulsory detention to hospital.