Skills of Helping Individuals, Families, Groups, and Communities

Rating:
Summary: A Cookbook for Disaster
Review: I read this book way back in graduate school. Let's just say if you have two or more days worth of clinical practice you will know that clients/customers/consumers don't always respond the Shulman's cookbook style examples would lead you to believe they would. I gave two stars because there were in fact some VERY general informational type items in the books, descriptions of issues that might be useful to the complete novice to social work. I am aware that this is a standard in social work schools everywhere and I can't think of a reason why! Do professors not read the texts they assign or have they been teaching so long that they have no idea what clinical practice is all about? Shulman makes it seem so easy... if we could just get our clients to rehearse Shulman's lines, all would be well and any six year old who could read the excerpts from clinical intervention examples could solve the world's problems. I felt disappointed to learn that my most recent student intern had been assigned to read Shulman. I told her to run out and get some books that would help her be a therapist to the real people we serve. My reading list did not include this book.

Rating:
Summary: Direct Practice for Dummies
Review: It's a shame that this book continues to find it's way into the required reading lists in graduate social work classes.

This book illustrates the tasks of interviewing and intervention in a very simplified and concrete fashion. In an introductory text, this is acceptable. However, in describing the "skills of helping" there is little if any attention given to an overarching theory of how people think, feels and behave. Intervention and theory inform one another in a continuous feedback loop. To presume to teach intervention without teaching a model of human behavior simply misses the point.

Professional training is, at it's best, about integrating theory and technique. This book fosters a disconnect between the tasks of intervention and a larger theoretical sense of what intervention is based on. In that sense it does an enormous disservice to trainees, who are the principal audience of this text.

I bought this book, as many people do, because it was required reading in my graduate program. I used it only for the occasional paper that demanded it be cited. When I wanted to referr to something useful, I read Shawn Shea's "Psychiatric Interviewing" or Leston Haven's "Making Contact." These are both excellent, accessible, well written and USEFULL books that any mental health trainee would benefit from reading.

If you have to buy the book to do course work in your classes you can't be faulted for purchasing it. If you really want to understand the dynamics of helping people, if you really want to learn how to interview, if you actually want to learn something that will be of enduring value to your practice, don't waste your time with this book.