Conference: Psychiatry in Everyday Life - Implications for Social Work

Along with the success of medical interpretation foils for a variety of human behaviors and lifeworld problems, psychiatric diagnoses have become increasingly important in everyday life and have also found their way into many social work practices.

Psychiatric knowledge, which in its production and implications is only partially compatible with the professional reflective knowledge of the discipline of social work and other socially oriented professions, therefore often poses a challenge for professional actors. On the one hand, social workers and other professionals in the psychosocial care system, child/youth welfare and education system have to deal with psychiatric diagnoses in terms of content - on the other hand, they provide other interpretations with their own problematization categories oriented towards social contexts (such as family system, peer group or living environment) in order to deal with social problems in a multi-layered way.

In many fields of social work, the question of how to deal with diagnoses and other psychiatric knowledge systems arises. Among other things, these can be problematized in the context of concrete case work with its pressure to act and possibilities for processing (generation of resources, existing help systems, ...) and against the background of the reinterpretation of social or institutional problem situations into individual and individualized attributions. For the discipline of social work, the question of how to describe and define its relationship to psychiatry and clinical psychology also arises from a professional theory perspective. The fact that social workers often work in interdisciplinary teams and collaborate with specialists from psychology and psychiatry in many contexts also means that they have to ask themselves this question in concrete terms.

The planned conference at the University of Siegen aims to create a space for discourse on both the theoretical and practical levels of care and action.

In addition to discussing the significance - opportunities and difficulties - of psychiatric categories for non-specialist disciplines and institutional settings today, the conference will offer the opportunity for interdisciplinary exchange. The central aim of the multi-perspective discussion is to find out what roles professionals from various fields play in diagnostic processes today, how they jointly influence the perspectives of people seeking help and how they can use their work to ensure perspectives on and feelings of inclusion and participation.