February 9, 2023 – Shorts Media – home of Social Work Shorts and Self Care Shorts

Difficult Conversations – Dealing with anger

In the final part of this ‘trilogy’ of difficult conversations articles I want to look at anger. Firstly, it’s worth saying that this may not just be the anger of the other...

Difficult Conversations – Advanced Skills

In the previous article we considered some initial thoughts about what to bear in mind when approaching a difficult conversation. Always be mindful as I said that good relationships are the foundation of...

Difficult Conversations – some initial thoughts

When it comes to conversations in Social Work practice, particularly difficult ones, we have to start with the question “What are we trying to achieve?” What is the problem we are trying...

Social work and Toy Story 4 – Bowlby and Attachment

Paragraph Is Disney and Pixar telling a tale of about children in the care system and showing us how social work should be done? In doing so they provide us with a beautiful...

Churning the Soil, caring professions (health, teaching and social care) and Madonna.

agraph Last month I enjoyed the lecture of Durham University’s new social work lead Professor Carlene Firmin, on contextual safeguarding. I was particularly energized by the language of “spaces” and shifting the risk...

Language and Power in Social Work, a fresh perspective from the Philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein

Social work can be seen as an endeavour of attempting to grasp at another person’s reality. We assess people and families striving to be as faithful as possible. In this article I...

Thoughts on ‘Radical Perspectives On Mental Health’

I had the luxury of a spare Saturday yesterday (12th February 2022) that coincided with an online festival of presentations and discussion on all manner of things from philosophy to science, all the...

Motivational Interviewing – be like Columbo

Remember the television show Columbo starring Peter Falk? The fictional Columbo was a detective who solved murder mysteries – hugely popular in the 1970’s. Having recently used this analogy with a group...