Shared Resources

Key Contexts
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<< Chapter 1 - Chapter 10
Chapter 21 - Chapter 30 >>

Chapter 11

The notions of risk and safety are treated in this chapter from three main theoretical perspectives, most of which (the theories and research of Maslow and Brearley) are rooted in psychological ideas about human need and safety. King’s work relates to systems theory and extends to the social and spiritual dimensions of a person’s life.

 

Chapter 12

Community care is the name given to a range of policy and practice initiatives which gathered momentum from the early 1990s, with the implementation of the NHS and

Community Care At 1990. This also introduced a market-based approach to community care services, in which the overwhelming majority of them were soon provided by contractors commissioned by the local authorities who had formerly provided the services directly. These private and independent providers grew by the early years of the twenty-first century to the point where the largest of them were multi-million pound enterprises, larger than some of the local authorities contracting them. Community care now has diversified into continuing care, domiciliary care and intermediate care, each a distinctive stream of services provided by collaborative partnerships across health and social care.

 

Chapter 13

Work with older people relates to a large body of knowledge derived from research, theorising and practice, in social care and empowerment. Social care is a rich and rapidly expanding area of knowledge and skills based in the social sciences and sociology and psychology in particular. The field of older people also has been enriched by studies rooted in medical and scientific research, including ageing and various treatments for the conditions and illnesses that afflict older people. Amongst these, research into arthritic and rheumatic conditions and into Alzheimer’s disease, other degenerative diseases such as osteoporosis, are prominent.

 

Chapter 14

Physical impairments, because of societal attitudes and ways of stigmatising and excluding people, may lead to them being disabled. The chapter contrasts the medical model with the empowering social model of physical disability. Major forms of impairment include those restricting mobility and the less commonly discussed consequences of partial sightedness and blindness and hearing loss and deafness. The chapter concludes by tackling some aspects of working with people with these different impairments.

 

Chapter 15

This chapter highlights the transformation in services for people with learning disabilities since the 1960s and 1970s, when people were still contained in warehouse-like 'subnormality' hospitals and other similar institutions. People with learning disabilities still experience disablement, where the medical model of disability is applied, but increasingly, linked with the use of the social model, have been empowered by various self-advocacy and activist movements for people who use services.

 

Chapter 16

This chapter deals with the changes in mental health policy which have taken place over the past few decades, highlighting aspects of current practice. It takes account of debates about how mental health problems should be tackled, referring to the assumptions and approaches on which they are based.

 

Chapter 17

This chapter is set in the policy and legal context of health and social services for children and their families. This is extremely broad and is linked with other very extensive and influential contexts rooted in the social sciences. For example, the framework for assessment of children in need and their families developed by the Department of Health (2000) draws extensively on knowledge gained from sociological and psychological research, such as factors related to children’s upbringing, problems of parenting and child development.

 

Chapter 18

Legislation regulating the administration of drug supply, storage and distribution forms the main context for this chapter. It touches on debates about the abuses of certain drugs and to that extent the discussion of the categorisation of drugs according to potential harm highlights the lack of clarity and certainty in those debates. It illustrates how many seeming facts in the medical aspects of health and social care in reality are problematic and a matter of dispute rather than essential truth. Too much in the sociology of drug taking is a matter of controversy for there to be much scope for undisputed fact.

 

 

Chapter 19

This chapter touches on drug taking again, from the viewpoint of the treatment of problems arising through the use of four different substances: illegal drugs, alcohol, food and tobacco. The main context for drug taking is the sociology of deviance, since the moral panics over drug taking and the huge illicit drug supply industry founded on crime totally overwhelm debates about how to treat people who take these drugs. Sanctions against drug suppliers in particular bring the chapter into touch with the literature on criminal justice policy and practice.

Like drug takers, people who abuse alcohol are discussed in this chapter against the context of the psychological literature on addiction. The chapter does not go into the literature on causation of addiction, which touches also on dependence on smoking. The treatment of dependence on smoking is dealt with in the Resource File following Chapter 20.

Eating disorders referred to briefly in this chapter relate mainly to the contexts of medical and psychologically based research and treatments of such conditions as anorexia nervosa and bulemia.

 

Chapter 20

This chapter relates to the contexts of criminal and youth justice policy and practice and the largely psychodynamically-based literature on different therapeutic approaches to treatment. There is also the context of criminology as a discipline, which at first sight seems out of character with this book. However, many people make the transition back and forth between mental health problems and offending, so on these grounds alone a chapter on youth justice has relevance. The sociology of deviance examines the process of criminalising people, including young offenders, and in this respect it provides an important context, enabling us to problematise (put under critical scrutiny as a contested subject) the fact of particular young offenders – including, perhaps, the case illustrated in this chapter – being subjected to criminal justice sanctions for offences which may come about through social and psychological factors beyond the control of the individual. However, as the chapter acknowledges, there is a debate to be had (which has penal philosophy as its context) between this ‘welfare’ perspective and the ‘justice’ perspective, which would apply a punishment to fit the crime, regardless of the circumstances of the offender.