Promoting Resilience: How Social Workers Help Clients Manage Mental Health

Are you studying for an online Masters in Social Work? Or maybe you’re a new social worker, freshly graduated, and ready to make a change in the world. Social work can be a rewarding and fulfilling career pathway where you get to assist the most vulnerable members of our society, some of who will have severe mental health issues. But how can you help your clients manage their mental health? This informative article will share how you can achieve this, so read on to learn how you can help your clients build coping skills, overcome challenges, and maintain mental well-being. Plus we’ll also cover the importance of resilience in mental health care.

Empowerment and Advocacy

As a social worker, you will work with people who are disempowered, disadvantaged, and disenfranchised in society. It is your role to actively work to empower your clients to take control of their mental health. You can do this by supporting them to be proactive in seeking help for their mental health, attempting recovery and utilizing tools and strategies to manage their mental wellbeing. You might support a client to advocate for themselves to the services they access or the local mental health facility for improved outcomes and better treatment. You might also encourage your clients to advocate for themselves to access appropriate resources to manage their mental health proactively. Social workers can also advocate on behalf of clients if their current mental state deteriorates to a point where they cannot advocate for themselves effectively. 

Promoting Resilience

As a social worker, you need to promote resilience in your clients who may struggle with their mental health. Resilience means being able to withstand personal challenges and setbacks – a person with mental health issues will face a great many of them in daily life. You can work to assess your client’s strengths, challenges, and obstacles and create tailored and personalized support plans that they can follow to become more resilient. You can also help them to identify their values and develop goals, all of which will increase and promote resilience. The goal here is to equip the client with the ability to manage stress and mental health issues and build their resilience to a point where they can manage their life and stress by themselves. 

Skill-Building

Another part of the role of social workers when working with clients with mental health issues is to help them develop skills to manage their mental health well. For instance, you could teach clients coping skills and mechanisms and promote problem-solving techniques and stress management strategies. All of these skills will go into the client’s personal toolkit for managing mental health, including during times of crisis, as well as stability. A great way to go about skill-building is to assume that the client already has innate capabilities and skills. The social worker’s role is to help the client realize this and bring their latent skills and strengths to the forefront of their mind. A coaching approach can be a great way to proceed, as a coach works with the talent of the people they coach, helping them to realize their true potential and unlock it.

Psychoeducation is the term given to educating clients about their psyche. It is a combination of learning and mental health treatment. For instance, a social worker could run educational groups or individual sessions aimed at providing clients with knowledge about mental health, how to manage symptoms, how to build resilience, and how to learn about and utilize the suite of tools available to them for managing their well-being. Some organizations that employ social workers have a suite of manualized programs that are aimed at psychoeducation. Some examples could be a group tailored to those with substance use and mental health issues or another group that is aimed at people experiencing anxiety, depression, or other severe mental health symptoms. 

Crisis Intervention

A large part of being a social worker is enacting effective crisis intervention when a client is in a mental health crisis. This could be due to psychosis, a stressful life event, major upheaval, or other circumstances, including housing instability, family violence, or more. A social worker can help clients manage their mental health during a crisis by assisting them to navigate the situation and build resilience in the face of immediate challenges and adversity. For example, a social worker can help a client to create a crisis management plan to deal with a crisis in their life, or a safety plan if the client is unsafe. For instance, if a client expresses that they are suicidal, a social worker can work with the client, their family, and other professionals involved in the client’s treatment in order to draft and document a suicide management safety plan that is aimed at keeping the client safe, connected to life, and helping them to manage the feelings that might be associated with their suicidality.

A Resilient Summary

This helpful and informative article has shared all about social workers, and how they can help their clients manage their mental health issues. We’ve discussed the range of different interventions and skills a social worker will utilize in order to help clients promote resilience. From empowerment, advocacy, skill-building, and psychoeducation to crisis intervention strategies, we’ve covered it all. By now, you should be ready to practice these skills, whether you’re a social work student or a newly qualified social worker.