Challenging Social Work Epistemology in Children’s Mental Health: The Connections Between Evidence-Based Practice and Young People’s Psychiatrisation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Broadly, social work epistemology—what we know and how we know what we know—in child and adolescent mental health is dominated by professional discourses about the merits of evidence-based practice (EBP). As an approach to client-work and professional decision making, EBP is promoted as ‘the’ standard for an effective, efficient and ethical practice. Yet, as a discipline, have we failed to consider the ways our adoption of EBP may inadvertently contribute to potentially harmful social constructions of young people and their experiences of distress? Particular to mental health work, have we failed to consider the ways EBP may contribute to young people’s psychiatrisation and the stigma of mental illness? Towards answering these questions, the purpose of this paper is to explore social work’s epistemology and adoption of EBP in children’s mental health against the backdrop of psychiatrisation and stigma. In two parts, first, we review the principles of EBP and the application to children’s mental health. Second, we examine the particular social constructions to emerge about young people and their experiences of distress and how they relate to psychiatrisation and stigma. We conclude with a call for social justice research to inform social work practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".