Open Letter to the People I Work With Who Want Me To Do Social Work

Dear ER Colleagues,

This is your friendly mental health worker, the one who meets with suicidal, homicidal and/or psychotic patients to screen them for admission to our psychiatric unit, or who calls 50 other hospitals in the state with psychiatric units, hoping they have a bed when we don't.

I really enjoy working with you, and I really enjoy my job, since it is completely focused on mental health and it is not really social work.  I would just like to remind you some of the things we in our department do, and the social work department doesn't, and vice versa.

The next time someone complains that we need more stuff written inSpanish around here....

I'm a social worker, not necessarily because I ever aspired to be one; that's just the way things worked out and the piece of paper the State makes me carry around in order to get paid for the work I do.  But it is the cause of much consternation on my part.  Lately, that consternation comes in two flavors:  my frustration with  social workers who understand economics and natural rights so poorly that they think spending other people's money on third parties solves the third parties' problems; and the stupidity inherent in certain politically correct myths propogated by social workers.

Such as the desire for people to have Michigan carpeted with copies of everything written in English, in Spanish, to help the invisible horde of Mexican and Guatemalen immigrants deplaning at Metro and coming over the Detroit-Windsor bridge and tunnel.

Mandatory Denouncing? The politics of CPS

Bad Quaker (or as Michael Deene likes to refer to him, Ben Quaker) is doing a superb podcast series on protecting children in a free society. Building on the premises that 1) we have no free society, at least in the US and 2) putting them in the "system" which includes the police, the courts, and Child Protective Services does not help kids and it especially doesn't help families.

I have my differences with Ben, which I've already addressed in a comment on his blog.  But CPS has been coming up in all sorts of coversations around me lately, so I figured it's time to do a blog post.

Let me first establish my street cred with regard to CPS, at least CPS in my own state.