Columbia University Press
2010
See Book Website: www.relationalcasemanager.com
This book is written for anyone who wonders about case management and the role of human relationships in mental health recovery. We argue for the importance of relationship by closely examining its process, that is, the back-and-forth exchange of attention and information that occurs between people. We explain how case managers can use the process of sharing attention and information intentionally to help clients develop or enhance abilities to achieve their greatest potential for living independently in the community with hope, satisfaction, and success. This book describes a practical method for engaging in supportive recovery relationships. Because the method uses ordinary everyday language, everybody involved in mental health care, including service providers, clients, and family members and close friends, can share it. It is important to emphasize that we are not proposing here a new service model for mental health treatment. This is not meant to be a substitute for the many, varied, and important case management models: recovery, assertive community treatment, or strengths. The method functions like a common user interface for and a complement to existing models.
Columbia University Press
2002
See Book Website, www.medsmoneymanners.com
Summary
Case managers in the United States should not be criticized as professionals who merely watchdog persons with severe mental illness in their use of medication, money, and social manners, for case managers are engaged in extremely complex relationships that require insight, acumen, and invention.
In his provocative inquiry into the work of case managers, Jerry Floersch, Ph.D., has discovered that case managers utilize two important forms of knowledge in their work but that only one form is being taught by academics in the classroom, promoted by academics in the service-delivery models that they invent, and mandated by state legislators who insist that service professionals remain faithful to the academic models. What Floersch has found is that case managers not only utilize the disciplinary knowledge (or case management textbook knowledge) of service models to help mental health consumers develop life-management skills, but they also utilize situated knowledge (or practical knowledge) which they invent when the models that they are forced to use fail. The situated knowledge that Floersch has unearthed is actually a re-invention of clinical language that enables case managers to evaluate a consumer’s capacity to become an independent community dweller. It is also a language that enables case managers to evaluate the effectiveness of the interactions between themselves and the people they are trying to help. Ironically, by inventing this clinical language, case managers are recovering the clinical skills that academics have purposely omitted from and suppressed with service models that emphasize the acquisition of objects and ignore the development of the self.
Floersch’s investigation raises important questions for social policy and social work education by revealing the need to reintroduce clinical training into case management training. His investigation also raises important questions for the future of anthropological, sociological, historical and social services research by insisting that academics study the spoken and written language of social workers