Critical Clinical Social Work and the Neoliberal Constraints on Social Justice in Mental Health
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.054 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.261 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.022 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.027 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".