DQ 2 WEEK 3 RESPONSE 3 449
Kenyetta Patterson
Hello Professor and class,
Although as social workers you want to give advice and be supportive you also have to be mindful in how we do so. Sometimes as social workers when you give advice to clients it makes them feel important and knowledgeable, but it can also be ineffective sometimes (pschychologytoday.com, 2012). The reason why is because it can foster a non-therapeutic dependency, such that clients do not learn how to solve problems themselves but merely how to ask more advice. In other words giving a client too much advice would not give them the skills and those tools needed to do for themselves as opposed to the social worker doing it for them. The other issue with giving advice to a client is that instead of giving advice based on research you can be giving advice based on your own experience. Social workers are supposed to present clients with a better comprehension of what motivates or causes them to act or think in the way they do. Instead of being used to give advice, they should be a tool that guide their client in making their own decisions. Supporting a client is exploring their choices and this can be done by coming together with both client and social worker reviewing different choices that are available with their pros and cons. In the redo video of the Probation video Amy explained to the client that he would have to go to treatment again and the client right away became agitated because of the last experience he had in the treatment program. The client wanted to do jail time instead of the treatment program. Amy did not give advice but instead