Psychosocial support is conditioned by a view of understanding mental health, mental health problems or attributing their causes. In my master's thesis, I start from the assumption that these phenomena should not be rigidly defined in terms of a physical reality that can be identified and studied, but as phenomena that are inseparable from the collection of beliefs and belief systems that we humans create in our interactions with each other. In the introduction, I argue that the understanding of the individual and of mental health solely as objects of science that can be empirically studied is reflected in a medical discourse that adopts a highly normative stance towards the individual and psychosocial support. Instead of a narrow classification of the psychological world, which pathologises the individual above all, I stress the need to reflect on the social context. In my introduction, I point out that understanding the subjectivity of the individual cannot be based on individual specialist treatment, but that attention must be paid to understanding the interactions of the systems in which we operate and on which we are formed. I would like to highlight the importance and role of social work, which as an academic discipline operates at the interface of the psychological and the social. From a social work perspective, I situate psychosocial support through a constructivist-interpretive and systemic paradigm and place it in the educational context or the work of the school counselling service. As one of the central principles of social work, I cite the importance of the interplay between scientific knowledge and lay subjective experience, represented by the individual personal experiences of young people captured in the study entitled Dostopnost organiziranih oblik podpore mladim v psihosocialnih in duševnih težavah in konteksti teh težav, Dekleva et al., 2018 (Accessibility of organised forms of support to young people with psychosocial and mental health difficulties and the contexts of these difficulties ). I link the concepts of social work to the Slovenian Programme guidelines for counselling (2008), and proposals for the Program guidelines for counseling work in educational institutions (2023) highlighting the importance of (social-work) relationships in addition to the need to be contextual. I ground the social-work relationship through an understanding of roles, ethics of care, authority and communication. I find that social work, through its concepts, methods and approaches, can respond to the needs of young people who want to be treated as subjects rather than objects in psychosocial support processes.
|
