ABSTRACT
Social work was formally established in the United Kingdom at the end of the nineteenth century. It developed out of charitable work focused on financial support for poor families. The second main strand in social work was represented by the Settlement Movement, which concentrated on improving the communal life of poor people by living with them, using community work methods to support and empower. The major impetus to developing mental health social work at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century was related to the work of leading psychiatrists and psychologists with ‘shellshocked’ soldiers during the First World War.1,2 This approach led to the establishment of the psychodynamically oriented Tavistock Clinic in London, where the first British psychiatric social worker was appointed in 1920.3 The second such appointment took place only in 1927, to the Hackney Jewish Child guidance clinic. Social workers in both the children and the adults outpatient services provided compre-
hensive psychosocial history of the child/adult and their family, enabled parents, teachers and partners of adult clients to understand the underlying psychological reasons for the index client’s mental ill health, and guided them as to how they could actively support that family member. The first course leading to the qualification of mental health social workers (originally
titled ‘psychiatric social workers’) took place in 1929, at the London School of Economics, with an American grant.
