ABSTRACT
This chapter is about how the helper and helped affect each other. Two very common examples of stereotypical ‘help’ which is sometimes unhelpful are those of giving people things and listening to their problems. The social worker in a statutory agency has the role of official gate-keeper to such residential institutions as mental hospitals, hostels, children’s homes and old people’s homes. Unfortunately, a combination of pressure of work and lack of confidence in some statutory social work agencies has led to much social work being in the ‘crisis intervention’ style which is forced upon weekend and night duty workers. The notion that social workers should always be trying to share with clients, to help on as nearly an equal basis of responsibility as possible, has become quite foreign in some departments. There can be an unhelpful collusion between the defensive expectations of the clients and the restrictive self-image of the social worker.
