Social Work in the field of mental health. The debate on diagnosis

Abstract

We claim that our participation in the field of mental health does not exist by a generous invitation of other disciplines, in this case psychiatry, but because the field needs to integrate the “know how” of social work.

The place where the concept of “madness” is produced includes socioeconomic processes (labor society, the fight against no-proletariat), institutional rules (the need to confine the other, the “different”), legal resolutions (penalization of poverty and the so-called “non-functional”families), administrative regulations (control of population), behavior studies (gnoseology of mental illness, MHD), thus forming an emergency net that results in that object. So the field object does not result from the development of a discipline–psychiatry–but from “the creation of singular ways of dominion among knowledge, from force relations and political relations in society” (Foucault, 2003), where social work also participates.

In every scientific or institutional activity, diagnosis is built up as a result of communication among its members, and in this debate social work has something to say.