The Role of a Clinical Social Worker in a Changing Society

This paper reviews the anomaly that seems currently to exist within the profession of social work — on the one hand a denigration of the value and utility of individualized services, and on the other, the increased anonymity of life in today's technological society. It is suggested that the need for individualized services will continue to exist regardless of institutional change and that clinical social work will remain an essential and specialized part of the social work profession. It is postulated that if the clinicians look elsewhere for education and recognition this will be a loss for social work.     

“It's A Boy Thing”

The recent proliferation of videogame theory has opened up a body of work concerned with legitimating the videogame as a viable cultural text. However, there is still a significant gap in research around addressing the lived cultures or cultural practices of gaming as an embedded domestic leisure activity. Furthermore, research into the “cultural practices” of videogames reveals that predications to play, perceptions about, and actual play are highly gendered in ways that reveal gaming as a normalised and normalising technology. This article is the result of nearly four years ethnographic research, during which I interviewed and recorded gamers and gameplay. Six out of the eleven participatory households are represented here. The scope of the research is also expanded through the questionnaire of, at the time of writing, 118 respondents. Included in this demographic are all-female and all-male households, mixed gender, sexuality, and ethnicity and diverse geographical intake from Northern Ireland to southern England. Throughout my research and this article, I argue the political and social necessity of including gamers into research on gaming, in order to better understand the significance of gaming and gaming discourses on our social and political lives.     

The Rate of Return on Investment in Wine

Is wine an investment alternative to stocks and bonds? First, we review prior studies regarding the pecuniary rate of return to wine and other alternatives to financial assets. Next, we calculate the rate of return to holding red Bordeaux wine from 1986 to 1996 using a repeat‐sale regression. Finally, we contrast the financial performance of wine, both on an aggregate basis and for various portfolios, to that of other asset classes. We conclude that wine does not yield greater returns than financial assets, especially when the volatility of returns and transaction costs are taken into account.     

Interdisciplinary Applications: Providing a Past for “Bodies That Matter”: Judith Butler's Impact on the Archaeology of Gender

Recent archeological work on gender and sexuality has drawn on Judith Butler's discussions of abjection and gender performance in ways that promise to contribute to explicating these concepts. Representations of the past have the potential to lend the illusion of time depth, and thus cultural legitimacy, to contemporary social phenomena. Initially, feminist scholarship in archaeology did not critically interrogate gender. Consequently, it could be used to reinforce static, natural, and binary representations of gender in reconstructions of the past and their use in conservative ways in the present. Recently, some archaeologists have begun to focus on the regulatory modes through which gender was produced and reproduced in prehistoric communities. Archaeological work has been especially successful in examining the material dimensions of gender performance, thus addressing one of the repeated criticisms of this concept. The authors of this essay provide an overview of this recent archaeological writing with an emphasis on the ways it draws on, critiques, and extends the work of Judith Butler.     

Is Managed Mental Health Treatment Psychotherapy?

The corporate takeover of mental health treatment has dramatically affected mental health treatment. Two essential constituents of psychotherapeutic process, the relationship between patient and therapist and the special communicative process associated with a talking treatment, have been significantly compromised. Therapists and patients are being forced to consider whether in the absence of confidentiality, self determination, and a secure treatment partnership managed mental health care can be called psychotherapy. Drawing on several detailed sessions from the managed treatment of a young woman, the writer concludes that the answer is no.     

Children's reactions to sibling loss

Loss of a child is a severe trauma to the members of any family. Although the reactions of parents to the loss of a child has received a considerable amount of attention in the literature, relatively little has been written about the impact of such a loss on the remaining sibling(s). The effect of sibling loss on a child is complicated by many factors; among them are the tendency of children to deny the reality of death and the feelings associated with this experience, as well as the manner in which the parents are able to cope with the loss. This article reviews the available literature and calls for more research dealing with the impact of the loss of a child on the entire family system.     

Moral imagination in long-term care workers

Our study focused on the cultural construction of dying and death in long-term care facilities. This article centers on direct care workers' perspective of residents' deaths. The data on which this article is based were gathered in a multi-year, multi-site study through formal ethnographic interviews, informal conversations, and on-site observations of residents and staff members. During fieldwork, we noticed an aptitude of direct care workers to deal with residents' deaths, which we named "moral imagination." The term is borrowed from other disciplines to describe a "way of seeing" residents. The case studies presented--that of three direct care workers: a dietary aide, a nurse aide, and an assistant activities director--are suggestive of workers in each category. Our study offers implications for future research concerning direct care workers' value to residents' quality of life. We also propose questions for long-term care facilities about standards of formal caregiving at the end of life.     

Sexual health education group for adolescents with mental problems

1. Providing sexual health education for adolescents with mental health problems presents a difficult but important clinical task. 2. Using a group format for this task is an effective way to provide information about sexual health and promote positive coping strategies related to relationships and sexual issues. 3. Group leaders need to be aware of their own values related to sexual issues and have the ability to be frank and nonjudgmental.