Exploring resilience and mental health in services users and practitioners in Ireland and Canada

ABSTRACT

Social work practitioners face significant challenges in their professional lives when advocating for marginalised and disadvantaged people who face deep structural inequalities, lack of resources and inaccessibility to social and health care services. Many service users are long-suffering, dispirited, and demoralised without hope for a better future. This is particularly the case in community based mental health services where social workers provide frontline counselling and advocacy to individuals with serious and persistent mental illness. Prolonged adversity takes a toll on the resilience of the service user while social work practice, aimed at counteracting such structural adversity, takes a toll on the resilience of the practitioner. Too often, community mental health agencies fail to recognise this toll and do little to support the resilience of social work practitioners. This study looks at practitioner perspectives on resilience and explores the idea of relational resilience as a buffer against burnout and compassion fatigue. The paper identifies themes from qualitative interviews with social workers on community mental health teams (CMH) in Ireland and assertive community treatment teams (ACT) in Canada who are involved in front line mental health services. The words ‘service user’ and ‘client’ are used interchangeably to reflect common usage in the two locations.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• mental health
• vicarious resilience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dermot Hurley is an Associate Professor of Social Work at King’s University College, London, Ontario, Canada and is also a registered social work practitioner in child & family therapy. His main area of research is promoting resilience in social work practice and he has completed studies with colleagues in Argentina, Canada and Ireland in child protection and mental health. He has published articles in the Journal of Social Work and Mental Health, the Journal of Systemic Therapy and the Canadian Social Work Review.

Gloria Kirwan is Assistant Professor of Social Work at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She is also a registered social worker and has a special interest in mental health social work both as a practitioner and a researcher.