This week you have viewed lectures on mental health professionals and social workers. Discuss the differences in training and scope of practice by comparing

Careers in Social Work

Well, the reason we chose to ask that question is because so often when I come to classes and I ask people, what's your first impression of what a social worker might do, they say, those are the people that take children away from their home. And that's the field where child welfare comes into play, and the truth is that many times people go into the field of social work because they want to make a difference and they've heard those stories, those awful stories, so they go into child welfare so they can make a difference in that area and protect children and help families to enhance the kind of relationships they can have with children. But that is not in the field where most social workers are employed.

So, I think from here I start with telling you about my story, how I became a social worker. I started undergraduate at University of Michigan in their music school. And I quickly learned that I did not have the talent, I did not have the skills, I was not going to be a musician. And that was a letdown for me because the one passion I had was for music, so I really couldn't figure out if I wasn't going to do music, what was I going to do? This was many, many, many years ago so there were no computers, there was no internet, there was no websites. So I went to the library and I found college catalogs, and I looked through all these different college catalogs and I was still wondering is there anything I can do with music? Is there anything that I can do that will still let me, somehow or other, use my music?

And I found a new field and it was called music therapy. And I thought, wow, this is really cool. I can use my music, I don't have to be a real talented performer, because I know I wasn't that, and I can help people. And that was always a really major part of my nature, that I got a lot of joy out of volunteering, out of being a good friend to people, out of helping people in their lives in any ways that I could as a teenager. And so I thought, this sounds like a real good marriage between this part of my personality and this passion that I have for music.

But at this time, the field of music therapy was young, very young. It had started in the 1940s. This was just 30 years later and there was just about five schools across the country that actually offered a program to become a music therapist. So that's what got me to Florida. I ended up at Miami in their music school working on becoming a music therapist. The last part of that degree required a field internship, which is very much the same as the last part of our BSW degree, and which is an integrated part of our MSW program.

Now, in our program you will learn from Professor Simpson how smooth the process is to go into that internship, whether it's the BSW or whether it's the MSW, she has created relationships with hundreds of agencies in the community, and it is a very easy, laid out process for how you get to do that internship when you're in our program. But many years ago as a music therapist with so few programs even across the country, there was not that kind of support. I had to go and find my own way into a program that would allow me to get the experience I needed so I could become a registered music therapy intern. And that led to my moving to Washington, DC, and I did my internship at St.

Elizabeth's Hospital. This is the first federally operated psychiatric institution in our country. St. Elizabeth's Hospital, at its peak, had 8,000 patients. Think about that. A psychiatric setting with 8,000 patients and 4,000 people that were employed there.

So, it was built in 1855 and I came there in the '70s and, at that time, there were still thousands of patients. There was a decline because different changes were happening in the field of psychiatric therapy, but there were still thousands of patients when I began there for my music therapy internship, and there were acres of land with 70 buildings across the hospital. And I was told to go to the different buildings where they housed different populations and to create interventions, and to meet the patients, and to provide music therapy.

So I had not been aware that Walter Freeman, who was known as the father of the lobotomy, had been a director at one time in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, and one of the first places that I went to provide intervention was to the geriatric building. And that was the first time for me that I worked and met people who had lobotomy's performed on them. Lobotomies is when they took an ice pick and put it in the brain to disconnect parts of the brain, because they thought that that would help people get well. It was a real eye- opening experience for me. And so I worked in the geriatric population, and then I went to another building. Lots of buildings where there were just your garden variety of people who had serious mental illnesses. So the population there were indigent people with very severe mental illness.

They had a component there was called John Howard Facility for the Criminally Insane, and I worked with the criminally insane. A few years after I left, John Hinckley, who is known for his attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan because of his obsession with Jody Foster, he was admitted to John Howard, and from what I've heard, he is still there today, and this is 30 years later. So this was where I went to do my music therapy internship.

I was told that I would have the opportunity, in all of these buildings where I was meeting these patients, to attend of the team meetings, the interdisciplinary team meetings in each of these buildings. There were psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers, and then lots of us interns from music, or psychodrama, or dance, but this was my first time of being introduced to people who were social workers. I was not familiar with that profession before I came to St. Elizabeth's. And probably, there were more social workers working at St. Elizabeth's than any other profession at the time that I was there.

And I was intrigued at these leadership meetings where we talked about the different patients that were in those units, by the kind of insight that the social workers offered in those interdisciplinary teams. And so I was then offered the opportunity to work with the social workers. And I joined them and assisted and co-led in some of their groups in these different buildings with these populations, and that's where I really got to know even more about the kind of people that chose that profession and the kind of work that they did. It was amazing. Across the board, these were people who showed the utmost respect for these patients. And think about the kind of patients I'm talking about and how difficult it can be to really, from the heart, be respectful, and compassionate, and wise, and

creative, and knowledgeable. And I saw them do work with these patients that just amazed me.

So when I finish that internship, I had an image about the profession of social work and about social workers that was very positive. But I now had my degree as a music therapist, and I was a registered music therapist. So I wanted to get a job in my field. Remember, no internet, no computer, no websites. We were ready to go back to Florida, so I pulled out yellow pages. Do y'all know what the yellow pages are? Yellow pages from all the different cities up and down Florida to look up different facilities that might be able to utilize a music therapist to work with their patients.

I typed 100 letters that I sent to all these different places throughout Florida. Do you think I got a job as a music therapist? Anybody? No, I did not get a job as a music therapist. So after several months, I got a job that was supposed to be for a BSW, for a student who had a bachelor's in social work. They could not find a student that had graduated that has a BSW for this position, which is what they wanted, but they hired me instead. And in this position, the person who trained me was a BSW. The person who was the director of the agency was an MSW. And I went to people's homes, because that's oftentimes what social workers do. In our understanding of the power of the environment that affects people, we're often right in there in that environment where our patients live, and where they work, and where they attend different aspects of their lives, work, and so forth.

And I would go to the homes where families had had children that were born with developmental disabilities, and they had children who were from infancy to age five. I would go to the homes, and I would get to know the families. And I would help them to make a loving and positive connection with these children, and I would help them to learn ways that they could support their children in developing different kinds of skills, and I would provide them with information about resources. And it was a really meaningful work experience for me, but what I realized was that I wasn't trained as a social worker, and I knew that I could do a much better job if I really had the education that social workers had.

So we were moving back to Michigan and I applied to go to school for my MSW degree, and I got that degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. That program had three different paths for becoming an MSW. And you'll find if you look at different schools, even now, that MSW programs are very diverse in how they train people because there are so many different ways that people end up working as a professional social worker.

So at Wayne State they had an administrative path, they had a community organizing path, and then they had the clinical social work path. And at USF, we have only the clinical social work path, and that is the path that I chose for my degree at Wayne State. they had two different field placements that you would have in the two years while you're getting your degree. We have two years to get the degree, but we have one placement that you do the whole time. So in my experience, one year I was in the school system learning

how to be a social worker in the schools, and the other year I was in a family service agency learning how to do social work in the family service.

They also had an opportunity where you could go into the hospital during the summer and be a part of an interdisciplinary team with physical therapy, occupational therapy, pharmacy. And I wanted to know more about medical social work, and so I took part in that experience. Some of you may be aware that at USF we have a place that's called The Bridge Clinic. It's a clinic on our university where, as an interdisciplinary team run by the medical students, involving our social work students and PT and some other programs, we are able to provide services directly to under-served populations in our area. And so this was kind of a similar experience that I had, just to be exposed a little bit to what medical social workers did.

When I graduated, I was employed easily, and that's been true with this degree throughout my professional career. I've never had a problem being able to find the work that I wanted to find with this degree. And that's pretty exciting especially since I never could become a music therapist. It's like OK, I made one good choice here with my education that's really been a right match for me and career.

And my first job was in a place that was in a rural community called Romulus. And it was in an old house that was called the Romulus Help Center, and that's what we tried to do, we just tried to help everybody. The director was an MSW, my supervisor was and MSW, there was me, and there was a BSW. It was just us to serve this community. And one day a week, they had to go to the high school where I could talk with any teen that was troubled that wanted to have some support. I also did home visits, because there were people in that community that didn't have the mobility or the transportation or there were things that were happening in their home that made it impossible or very difficult for them to be able to leave their home, and so I went to them.

And I also did a lot of work in the center itself. In this facility, we were partially funded by substance abuse agencies, so I also worked with involuntary patients. And these are the patients who were in prison, or they were given probation and as part of their being released from prison, or as part of their probation, they were required to see me. So that was a whole other realm of working with people in a different way than I would work with the people who were coming because they really wanted the help that we could provide.

I stayed there for a couple years, and then I began working in community mental health. I mentioned that at St. Elizabeth's the population started to decline from that peak at 8,000. And although there were still thousands when I left, over the years there became less and less and less and the land got smaller and smaller while the government preyed at other things. And right now, there's actually Homeland Security is where St. Elizabeth's once was, and there's just a little tiny area that's still St. Elizabeth's. And part of the reason that that happened was that the field of mental health began to question if these large institutions were the right way for patients with mental health problems, mental illness, to

get the treatment that they needed. And they decided that it was better to be community- based.

So here I was, about eight years or so later, working in a community mental health setting. And what I saw was that there was a lot of poor planning that happens around the services that get provided for people that have mental illness. That just because they didn't think that large, where people live for years and years, those people that I worked with lobotomy's have been there for 50 years and never had a visitor. So they thought that's a pretty horrible thing, but now if you see a lot of people that are homeless and they're on the streets, those were some of the people that would have at least gotten care in some of these bigger facilities if they still existed.

So at the time that I was hired for the community mental health, they were closing down all of those large facilities and we were trying to service some of those people who were mentally ill that were in the community and could find us, but we also serviced people of all levels of troubles. We saw people who just had different stresses in their life and needed a little bit of extra support, we saw people who had marital problems, mild depression, major depression, panic disorders, anxiety, all of the spectrum of different kinds of mental health issues is what I worked with for about five years.

And then, I was hired by a hospital. And although it was a big medical hospital, they had four units that were for psychiatric patients, and one of them was to specialize with eating disorders. I was hired to be the specialist with the eating disorder population. One of the things that became really clear to me in that position was that there's a lot of people who really respect social workers. And in this position I really felt the validation of my degree and my experience.

So in the eating disorder unit at this hospital, we had an interdisciplinary teams with the psychiatrists, the psychologists, recreational therapists, not musical therapists, recreational therapists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, nurses. And I was the leader in terms of bringing in all the information about the patient's family, because besides the psychiatrist, I was the only one that had the opportunity to meet with the family, as well as with the patient. And that's because social work is about taking it all in. It's not about isolated individual people, but it's about people in the context of their environment, and family is so much a big part of most of our environment. And so, on that team meeting, each time we met I brought in psychosocial information so that everybody would understand the context that brought this patient into our unit.

I got pregnant and I stayed home for awhile, and while I was home I worked in private practice and I worked for an EAP. And an EAP is an employee assistance program. And that's where some of the big corporations in Detroit, the automobile corporations, and IBM, and things like that, they send their employees for some counseling. Brief counseling, 10 session counseling. So while I was doing private practice with more longer relationships, I was also doing a EAP with shorter, and that's one thing that is very exciting about being a social worker in the clinical field is that there are so many different ways that you can be a social worker and learn and grow and keep changing and evolving

and getting better at how you help people. And so I really enjoyed that opportunity to be able to do different kinds of work with the different people that came to my office.

Around that time, my husband was working and somebody came into the business that he was working in and they asked for him by name. He came to meet with them and they put a gun to his head. They asked him to go to the vault and give them the money, and then they took all of the people that were working in the business and they had them lie down on the floor and take their clothes off. And they all thought that they were going to be killed. They did not get killed, but they also never found the person that asked my husband by name him to come, and my husband developed post-traumatic stress disorder. So first hand, I became aware of the impact of that kind of experience, and my husband was never able to return to his work. So fortunately, during all the years that he had been in this particular business, he was developing alternate [INAUDIBLE] and had actually acquired another degree, and he began to explore possibilities of a new career in Florida.

So we left Michigan and moved here where he was able to work again and able to, over time, have those symptoms dissipate from that horrific experience. And I became employed, again, very easily and very readily, in Florida at Jewish Family Services. And one thing was in Michigan, we didn't have licensure, we had a certification that I held, an ACSW, but in Florida, it was important to get licensure at this point in time. And so I had the education, I had the experience, I had the supervision, I just needed to take the exam. So I took the exam, got licensed, and worked for eight years at Jewish Family Services, and I had another one of those experiences of realizing the value of this particular degree, because I was the only professional that they had in the Jewish Family Services counseling area that they could get reimbursed for Medicare.

As a master's level professional social worker in the state of Florida, we were able to get reimbursed for Medicare. And I don't know if it's still true that other master's levels don't have that privilege, but at the time that I worked there, that's something that they really valued about my being able to do that. And I worked with Holocaust victims, I worked with the elderly that were more spry and more autonomous than the ones that I certainly had worked with at St. Elizabeth's. And I worked with families and adults of all ages also, providing all kinds of support in whatever kinds of problems that brought them in for counseling. Oftentimes it was transitions. It might have been a divorce, it might have been a death of somebody, it might have been that kind of depression that was caused by some kind of experience that they had that was fairly easy to resolve in terms of working in the relationship with them.

So I had 25 or so year career in clinical social work. And I thought to myself, I've done a lot of fabulous things with this degree, and every position that I've held has had meaning for me, has had great rewards for me. I've always been really happy with this career. And I wonder if there's something else I can do with this degree and some other kinds of skills and some other ways that I can develop myself. I decided to leave Jewish Family Services and 10 years ago I was hired here to be the advisor for the School of Social Work. And so I have been here for about 10 years, and it has been such a pleasure for me to be able to share my experiences and to support people who have thought, hmm, I'm not

sure what social work is, I'm not sure if that's what I want to do, and I've had the chance to be able to discuss that with them. And for some of them, it is the right path, and I've been able to then guide them through for them to get a BSW degree or an MSW degree and to go forward and be able to have a magnificent career as a professional social worker. And that's my story.

Hi, I'm Teri Simpson and I am a social worker. And Dr. Cooperman, at her request, we've been asked to tell our stories of how we became social workers. Mine is not quite as cerebral and planned as Amy's, things just kind of happened to me. I, unlike you, did not go– most of you– did not go to college until I was 38. Well, I started nurse's training. I had a year of nurses training right out of high school, saw my first autopsy, went home and told my dad, I don't think this is for me, dad. So I went off and had a very successful, or moderately successful, career in sales, which I still use in social work, by the way. So my husband died while he was in the military, and so at 38 I went to get my bachelor's degree.

So I came here to USF and I was getting a degree in Psychology because those are the kind of books I read for entertainment. And so I came to USF, but while I was here I volunteered for Hospice. So I'd had several losses in my life and I thought, OK, I've gotten counseling and I've survived these. I'm tough, I'm strong, I want to help other people. So you'll find that a typical response to people enrolling in the social work department.

As I volunteered for them for four years, I went to the woman who had the job I wanted at hospice and I said, I want your job. So what kind of master's degree do I need? And she said, I only hire MSW. And I said

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