ABSTRACT
How can social workers do ethical, meaningful work and avoid feeling alienated, overwhelmed and burnt out? Self-care discourses in social work are frequently invoked in response to this question. Professional literature, academic and workplace teaching contexts encourage social workers to do better self-care, regularly reminding them of their individual responsibility to preserve personal wellbeing and assist in preventing burnout in the profession. This construction of self-care as an antidote to burnout rests upon, and contributes to, dominant Western individualist discourses of independent being and personal responsibility for the self. Workers experiencing isolation and exhaustion are conceived as lacking, not sufficiently skilled, or overly vulnerable to the difficulties of surviving the injustices and complexities of the work. In contrast, many workers experience that no amount of self-care planning and strategies for work-life balance can render them impervious to the effects of everyday social injustice, impoverishment, diminishment and despair. Nor can strategies like regular exercise and meditation remove the effects of unjust bureaucratic and organisational operations that inhibit their work. This chapter explores a critical ethic of caring for each other that is founded upon constructs of relational being and collective responsibility. We suggest that practices of looking after each other in the work can contribute to a conscious, critical and transformative professional response to the divisive effects of oppression and injustice.
