I chose the topic of my thesis because of the many negative experiences of my friends and relatives with psychiatric institutions, as well as the behavior of the staff with them, including social workers. In psychiatric institutions, the attitude towards users and their treatment are still often inhumane and violate human rights. Therefore, in my diploma thesis, I investigated what experiences the users had with employed social workers, what kind of relationship they established, and whether they used empowerment strategies. In the theoretical part, I wrote about mental health, psychiatric institutions, hospitalization and its consequences. I also wrote about the role of social work in psychiatric institutions, about empowerment, and exploring the world of life. The assignment also contains an empirical part, in which I used semi - structured interviews to investigate the experiences of people with mental health problems who were hospitalized in a psychiatric institution. I conducted ten interviews, and I came to the results with the help of qualitative analysis. With short comments, I tried to show people's experiences with social workers. In the last part of the diploma thesis, I summarized the findings of the methodological work. These show that a large number of users established a poor relationship with social workers, that they were poorly informed about the actual work of social workers in a psychiatric institution, and that they would like social workers that they could trust and who would care about them. In theory, social workers employed in psychiatric institutions could significantly improve the quality of life and speed up the recovery of users of psychiatric institutions, but in practice it turns out that this is not always the case. As suggestions, I cite more consistent use of empowerment and other elements of the working relationship by social workers employed in psychiatric institutions, more cooperation with family members of users, and regular implementation of user satisfaction surveys.
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