Social Work with Interpreters

Social workers help very culturally diverse populations. Therefore social workers are likely to work with language interpreters in various settings such as mental health agencies, healthcare settings, communities, and courts. Interpreters are persons whose role is to verbally or through sign language translate between individuals or groups who do not share the same language. A translator is a person who translates the written word from one language to another. Not all interpreters feel competent to translate writing, and not all translators feel competent to translate languages verbally. An interpreter can interpret verbatim or conceptually. There are professionally trained interpreters and informal interpreters. Professional interpreters have been trained and are hired to perform interpreted services in a variety of settings. Informal interpreters might be staff members who are bilingual, friends of the clients, or family members of clients including their children. There are clinical and ethical considerations that social workers must consider when working with interpreters, be they professionally trained or informal.

Clinical Supervision of Group Work: A Conceptual Review

Despite the vast amount of group work that is conducted in clinical mental health agencies across the nation, scholarship on the supervision of group work is limited. This article will review the literature pertinent to the supervision of group work and highlight salient research of the supervision of group work with special populations. Recommendations for clinical supervisors and supervisees engaged in group work are provided.

The Social Mandate to Deal With Mental Health

The chapter aims to explore the construct of mental health in a psychoanalytic perspective with a psychosocial approach. In particular, the chapter studies mental health by analysing traces to detect social mandate characterizing different mental health agencies. The highlighted hypothesis could be interpreted as that social mandate is a clue of local cultures about mental health, which determine fantasies about mental health issues, grounding on symbolizations shared by professionals, users, and community. The chapter introduces three clinical experiences of interventions, carried out in different contexts: a public mental health service, a public middle school, a psychoanalytic private office. All the presented experiences concern mental health field, even though they are characterized by different features in terms of subjects, methods, professionals, users, and organizations involved. The chapter explores those differences in order to focus on transversal issues.

Development and psychometric validation of the interRAI ChYMH externalizing subscale

The interRAI Child and Youth Mental Health (ChYMH) is a standardized assessment instrument utilized in over 60 mental health agencies that promotes seamless transition across public healthcare sectors. The purpose of this study was to develop and assess the reliability and validity of the externalizing subscale on the interRAI Child and Youth Mental Health (ChYMH). Part one invited a panel of experts (i.e. doctoral-level clinical psychologists) to assess content validity of the items relevant to externalizing behaviors. Items that experts deemed representative of externalizing symptoms underwent unrestricted factor analyses in a sample of children/youths 4 to 18 years of age ( N = 3,464) collected across 39 mental health agencies. The final externalizing subscale showed strong content representativeness, high internal consistency, and good structural validity for a two-dimensional model of reactive and proactive externalizing behavior. In part two, Bayesian correlations demonstrated that the interRAI ChYMH externalizing subscale showed strong associations with externalizing subscales, anger, and disruptive behavior measures from various assessment instruments (i.e. Beck Youth Inventories, Social Skills Improvement System, Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale, Child Behavior Checklist, Brief Child and Family Phone Interview). Overall, the externalizing subscale demonstrated strong measurement properties for the assessment of behavioral disturbances.