In my thesis, I explore the power of a support group in the discharge of a person from a secure ward of a social welfare institution. I focus on the process of advocacy action, which was aimed at transferring the user from the secure ward to the community, and on the dynamics that developed through the process between the user, the advocacy group, and the institution. The research is divided into four themes or four research questions. In the first part, I discuss the influence that the past activities of the members of the advocacy group had on the formation of the action group itself, therefore I first discuss the theoretical significance of autonomous spaces and activism in relation to broader social movements, and then I examine social movements and their historical significance for the development of social work. In the second part of the research, I examine advocacy through the prism of responding to injustices in society, especially in state institutional systems. In this part, I first explain the historical reasons for the establishment of the mental health apparatus, which is still the basis for systemic discrimination in the field of mental health, then I focus on the development of advocacy, and finally I discuss the legal aspect of advocacy and its potential to bring about change at the systemic level. The third part of the research examines the importance of using social work tools in comparison with the legal aspect of the action. In this part, I first examine the social work tools that were developed in the spirit of normalization and their use from the advocacy perspective of social work, and then I theoretically discuss how social work tools are used in institutional environments where the use of risk analysis by medicine is particularly questionable, as it is on this basis that the court decides the fate of people. In the last part of the research, I discuss the importance of action advocacy groups in uncovering systemic shortcomings in the institutional environment. In this part, I focus on the legal basis governing the admission and discharge of people from secure wards, the legal basis governing their rights, and the exceptions that allow for the restriction of those rights. Finally, I discuss the violation of fundamental human rights in the institutional environment and the legal aspect of our advocacy action.
In the empirical part, based on an analysis of advocacy action, I explore how the support group developed advocacy practices and strategies that contributed to the discharge of a person from a secure ward, and how the power relations between professionals, the institution, the person, and his social network changed through this process. The analysis shows that the past activities of advocacy group members in various initiatives within autonomous spaces were of great importance for the formation of the group and the success of the action itself. The experience of self-organization and autonomy of such groups enables them to exert pressure on institutions. In our case, by putting pressure on the institution's management, we achieved concrete changes in the interests of the residents and, ultimately, the discharge of the person from the secure ward, while at the same time revealing the previously hidden dynamics of the institution's management's abuse of power over the residents.
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