Social Work in the Public Eye
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| Paulette Janus |
Paulette Janus was in the fifth grade when she realized
the importance of the mind-body connection, she tells the Wilmette Life, a
Chicago Sun-Times publication.
“My friend’s mom had cancer and she always had this positive
outlook, always had her wig on and her makeup on, and she lived much longer
than she was expected to,” Janus says in a recent article. “I took that with
me, and when I went to college and started studying psychology. That story
always made me think about the way we process things and how our emotional
state drives everything else in our lives.”
Janus, an NASW member, is a licensed clinical social worker
with a B.A in psychology and a master’s in social work. As a therapist and mediator,
she has worked in many capacities, including the outpatient child and
adolescent behavioral health program at Mount Sinai Hospital and as an adoption
preservation therapist at Catholic Charities. She now has a private practice
with offices in Chicago and Wilmette, Ill., where she helps teens and children
cope with anxiety, social issues and feelings of being excluded by peers or
bullied, all of which can lead to depression.
“A lot of parents will tell me they’re not sure if their child
will agree to therapy, and if the child does, they won’t engage. I tell
parents, ‘If you can get them here, once they are here it’s my job to get them
talking,’” Janus says in the article. “I typically find one of two things. They
either spill everything and they are relieved to be getting help, or it takes a
while to get them engaged and ease their fear of therapy, which I think I’m
skilled at.”
Janus also offers marital therapy, mediation and collaborative
divorce, areas she finds particularly rewarding, the article says. “The biggest
issues I see with married couples are communication issues and parenting
expectations,” she says. “People think that the goal of communication is to
change the other person, and I try to help them realize that communication is
about expressing ourselves and feeling like we are being heard.”
Janus says patients can truly benefit from couple’s therapy,
because talking to a neutral person is a safe space and allows freedom of
expression.
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| Kenneth Hanna |
NASW member Kenneth Hanna created Lion Youth and
Community Services LLC, an Afrocentric counseling and group therapy center in
St. Cloud, Minn., because he wanted to see more African-American leaders,
according to an article in the St Cloud Times.
“I’ve really always had a passion for working here, in this
town, with the African-American kids here,” Hanna says in the article. He says
40 percent of the kids in the U.S. criminal justice system are
African-American, and they make up about 7 percent of the total population.
This could partly be a result of a societal misunderstanding
of African-American culture, he says, and partly because of damaging family
dynamics. In a matriarchal home, sometimes a mother doing her best leaves a
young man feeling worthless. Since this doesn’t teach young men to deal with
frustration in a healthy way, it can lead them to be separated in school.
“My groups are really designed to start that healing process
first, let’s get that baggage out of the way,” Hanna says, adding that he was
surprised by the negativity that surfaced as Lion Youth got started in late
2012.
“When you start talking about empowering black people, somehow
there’s this fear that goes into people’s minds,” he says in the article.
“There’s a fear of African-American men in particular in our society.” Through
his social work skills and Lion Youth, which is open to people of all ages,
races, genders and ethnicities, Hanna says he hopes to dispel the stigma that
many African-Americans feel about therapy. “I think it’s just a distrust of the
system, not fully understanding mental health as much as they should, that it’s
normal,” he says. “There are other ways to handle situations besides things
that are detrimental to your health.”
Through Lion Youth, Hanna is working to have a youth literacy
program in place this summer, and hopes that in his lifetime he will see an
influx of African-American doctors, lawyers and leaders. And in order to ensure
that, he says, African-American youth need encouragement. “I think we have to
make sure that young people have a sense of self, that they can accomplish
these things.”
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| Michele Kelley |
NASW member Michele Kelley was a presenter for an
expert panel on the National Prevention Strategy, held by the Social Work
Section of the American Public Health Association, according to an APHA news
release.
The panel included social work and public health practitioners
and scholars, who shared their vision of the National Prevention Strategy —
part of the Affordable Care Act that emphasizes prevention of disease through
community capacity building, expansion of quality preventive services and
eliminating health disparities, the release says.
Kelley, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, provided
guidance to inform public health social work education and research to enhance
the profession’s capacity to address NPS priorities. Kelley says the NPS is an
unprecedented opportunity to advance prevention and health equity for all. “We know that social determinants have the
greatest impact on population health status and the likelihood of premature
death — more than genetics or access to health care,” she said. “Therefore
policies and strategies that assure more health promoting, safe and livable
work, and school and community conditions have the greatest impact.”
The key take-home messages of the panel include enhancing the
emphasis on community development and policy approaches in curricula and
professional development, developing an ethos and skill sets for formation of
enduring partnerships for sustainable change, and engaging a new generation of
future practitioners and scholars for this work, the release says.
“More than ever, place and health matter and our profession
with its rich history and knowledge in macro practice, community organization
and policy is positioned to play a key role in building ‘the healthiest nation
in one generation,’ a present-day version of what the women of Hull House
envisioned,” Kelley said.
To read more articles like these, visit www.SocialWorkersSpeak.org
From May 2013 NASW News. © 2013 National
Association of Social Workers. All Rights Reserved. NASW News
articles may be copied for personal use, but proper notice of
copyright and credit to the NASW News must appear on all copies
made. This permission does not apply to reproduction for advertising,
promotion, resale, or other commercial purposes.
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