Critical Clinical Social Work and the Neoliberal Constraints on Social Justice in Mental Health
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite a strong history of social justice–based social work professional education in Canada, there has not been an intentional integration of direct critical clinical mental health practice with social justice–based theory. Progressive social work has tended to view clinical work as focusing on the individual and failing to contribute to social change. In this article, I elaborate upon a critical clinical social work approach influenced by postmodern critique, and feminist-, narrative-, and collaborative-based practice rooted in critical theory. Critical clinical practice disrupts the individual/social binary through counterviewing unhelpful dominant social discourses and producing counterstories that participate in social resistance. I explore the constraints of neoliberalism on social work mental health practice and its influence on the ability of social workers to practice social justice–based social work. Neoliberalism constrains social workers’ ability to address the social and structural determinants of mental health through its focus on economic rationalization, biomedicalization, and individual responsibilization, alongside rationalized practices that emphasize evidence-based and short-term efficiency-based models. I argue that social work is facing a crisis as a disempowered profession, as it attempts to reconcile its commitment to social justice and the importance of addressing inequity, marginalization, and oppression while often working in settings that demand the subordination of social work knowledge to neoliberal biomedicalism. Under these conditions, a critical clinical approach to mental health practice is needed now more than ever.
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.
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 | 0.031 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 it