Provides information on all things social work, including direct practice (both clinical and community organizing), research, policy, education... and everything in between.
[Episode 125] In today's social work podcast, I speak with three men on a mission to prevent suicide. Matt Runnells, Kevin Hines, and Greg Van Borssum shared their stories of managing suicidal thoughts, self-care, caring for others, and building a global network of support for suicide prevention.
I spoke with Matt, Kevin and Greg at the American Association of Suicidology annual conference in April 2018. Kevin's movie, Suicide: The Ripple Effect premiered the evening of our interview. These three guys were so pumped up about suicide prevention, so full of inspirational quotes and stories, that by the end of the interview I found myself speaking with the cadence and phrasing of a motivational speaker. Published on World Suicide Prevention Day 2019 as part of National Suicide Prevention Week 2019 and Suicide Prevention Month 2019.
#WSPD19 #NSPW19 #SPM19
[Episode 124] Today's episode of the Social Work Podcast is an interview with Lori Gottlieb - NY Times best-selling author, advice columnist for The Atlantic, and therapist. We talked about how her experience as a writer influences her work as a therapist, and how her therapy informs her writing. We talked about how she takes a client’s story out of the therapy room and turns it into something that therapists can appreciate, and non-therapists can get excited about. Lori reads from her 2019 New York Times bestseller and Amazon Best Book of April 2019, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. We ended our conversation talking about how difficult and necessary it is for therapists to be the client.
[Episode 123] Today's episode of the Social Work Podcast is the second of a two part-series about Dr. Lisa Damour’s 2019 text Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls. In today’s episode we talk about rape culture; the problem with the word "consent"; and how society's criticisms of the way girls speak is really just another way of criticizing girls. In Part 1, Lisa and I talk about the difference between stress, anxiety and trauma; what “good” and “bad” pressure look like; and how schools, parents, and providers can think about pressure.
[Episode 122] Today's episode of the Social Work Podcast is the first of a two part-series about Dr. Lisa Damour’s 2019 text Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls. In today’s episode we talk about the difference between stress, anxiety and trauma; what “good” and “bad” pressure look like; and how schools, parents, and providers can think about pressure. In part two we move the conversation into issues of rape culture and how society criticizes the way girls speak as a cover for criticizing girls.
[Episode 121] In today's episode of the Social Work Podcast, I speak with Dr. Darlyne Bailey and Dr. Terry Mizrahi about the Special Commission on Macro Practice. We talk about how their social work experiences led them to co-chairing the Special Commission, the relationship between case and cause, moment and movement, and process and product. We talked about the false dichotomy between micro and macro practice, and that there is nothing wrong with focusing your energies on one or the other. We ended the episode with a call for the social work profession to focus energies on increasing the percentage of macro-concentration social work students to 20% by 2020.
Today's interview focuses on how simulation can be used to teach holistic competence. They talked about how in the late 2000s, they recognized that there were several problems with the existing model of teaching students practice skills. Their solution was to simulate real-world problems so that students could practice specific skills, get feedback, and improve their practice. In today's episode, Marion and Toula detail the steps necessary for creating simulations, how they involved field supervisors in the development of client simulations, the iterative nature of improving the simulations over time, and an innovative approach to help students learn knowledge and skills through practice and feedback they call "Practice Friday".
I was excited to talk with Dr. Freedenthal because she's come up with 89 tips and techniques that you can start using right away with suicidal clients.
In today’s episode, we talk about five of them:
Tip #10 – Embrace a Narrative Approach: “Suicidal Storytelling”
Tip #35 – Know When and Why to (and not to) Pursue Hospitalization
Tip #36 – Know Why not to Pursue Hospitalization
Tip #64 – Incorporate a Hope Kit
Tip #88 – Propose a Letter to the Suicidal Self
[Episode 118] In today’s episode, I talk to Erlene Grise-Owens, Justin “Jay” Miller, and Mindy Eaves, the editors of the TThe A-to-Z Self-Care Handbook for Social Workers and Other Helping Professionals, published by The New Social Worker Press. My guests debunk some self-care myths and they share some of the guidelines about making self-care a practice. My guests not only talk about what self-care is and is not, but they also model it. We talk about SMART self-care plans, about how being active is not the same as being athletic, about how personal self-care requires professional self-care and that professional self-care affects organizational wellness and that organizational wellness affects professional self-care.
[Episode 117] Hey there podcast listeners, Jonathan here. It is March 5th, 2018 and that means we’re on day 5 of #SWMonth 2018.
For the past 4 years, since 2014, The New Social Worker Magazine has celebrated Social Work Month by publishing inspired and insightful reflections. One of the things I like best about the poems, essays, and reflections at socialworker.com is that they are great for sharing with folks that might not understand what social workers do. Linda Grobman, the social work pioneer and award winning publisher of New Social Worker gets some of the profession’s best known or most profound thinkers to share their wisdom as part of this series.
This year I was honored and humbled to receive an invitation from Linda to submit a short piece for Social Work Month. True, the invitation was addressed to “Dr. Brené Brown, University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work,” but nevertheless I accepted. Linda is such a good sport that she didn’t have the great daring to rise strong and tell me that I had received the invitation by mistake. And I kinda feel bad that if there isn’t a contribution from Brené this year it is basically my fault. But, I mean, what are you gonna do? Opportunities like this don’t come around often.
[Episode 116] Today's episode of the Social Work Podcast is about social media and gang violence. It is about 8 million tweets, cyberbanging, and using social media to get a 360-degree view of someone’s life. It is about the amazing research of Dr. Desmond Patton.
Dr. Patton's research uses qualitative and computational data collection methods to examine how and why gang violence, trauma, grief, and identity are expressed on social media and the real world impact they have on well-being for low-income youth of color.
Desmond and I spoke in January of 2017. He unpacked the complex relationship between gang banging and cyberbanging – a term he and his colleagues coined back in 2013. We also talked about how social workers can think about the relationship between social media and youth. Desmond encourages us to think of the online world as a new social environment that social workers need to understand. He questions existing agency policies that prohibit social workers from interacting with clients on social media and asks if those are empirically-sound policies. And one of the things that I love the most about Desmond’s work is that he combines the rich understanding that comes from qualitative research and the cutting edge insights that can come from analyzing big data.
