ABSTRACT
The more experience one has of working with vulnerable and troubled people, the greater the danger that we become familiar and desensitised to the impact of their condition. We are all familiar with the surgeon who cracks jokes amidst the gore, the ‘patter’ we might receive from the oncologist as we are his/her fifth cancer patient of the day, as he/she needs to be ‘detached’, but this professional approach can become depersonalising, belittling and inadvertently stigmatising-as with medical doctors, so too with social workers. We need to remain sensitive to the enormity of the impact that both schizophrenia and its diagnosis can have upon the client and their family.
