Meds, Money, and Manners: The Case Management of Severe Mental Illness

by Jerry Floersch

Overview

As case management has replaced institutional care for mental health patients in recent decades, case management theory has grown in complexity and variety of models. But how are these models translated into real experience? How do caseworkers use both textbook and practical knowledge to assist clients with managing their medication and their money? Using ethnographic and historical-sociological methods, Meds, Money, and Manners: The Case Management of Severe Mental Illness uncovers unexpected differences between written and oral accounts of case management in practice. In the process, it suggests the possibility of small acts of resistance and challenges the myth of social workers as agents of state power and social control.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231504812
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	03/06/2002
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	286
Lexile:	1190L (what's this?)
File size:	942 KB

About the Author

Jerry E. Floersch is an assistant professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University.

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Formation of Community Support Services
The Rise of the Case Manager
Strengths Case Management
Landscape for a Case Manager: The Carless Mentally Ill
Oral and Written Narratives of Case Managers
Money
Meds
Chapter 9. The Helper Habitus: Situated Knowledge and Case Management
Chapter 10. Conclusion

What People are Saying About This

Joseph Walsh

This is the most intensive and thorough study of case management practice that I have ever read.

Elizabeth Lunbeck

Rich in theory and compelling and illuminating description, Meds, Money, and Manners challenges conventional understanding about the working and effect of disciplinary power as it guides readers through the confusing and contradictory landscape of deinstitutionalization. Social workers and policymakers, as well as historians and sociologists of mental illness and its treatment will find much of interest in this engaging book

James W. Drisko

Paying close attention to language and meaning, Jerry Floersch's study documents how practitioners find ways to work around the limitations and inconsistencies of practice models to meet unique service needs while seeking to stay within the spirit of the model. The book is vivid and astute, wonderful as history, as critique, and as a framework for future research.

Philippe Bourgois

Anthropologists will find this ethnographic and historical study of social workers and their practices in mental health an invaluable contribution to our understanding of how Foucauldian disciplinary knowledge and power operates in the everyday lives of human service workers.

Jeanne Marsh

This work provides essential insights into the helping process, identifying those elements that are fundamental but often are not incorporated into our intervention models.

Editorial Reviews

Having worked with and studied case managers while they mobilized resources in a mental health organization to enable former hospital patients to continue living in communities, Floersch (social service administration, U. of Chicago), describes how they use case management theory called continuum-of-care or community reintegration to produce apartment-dwelling consumers of mental health services. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

This book provides a fascinating albeit bleak insight into the daily routine of practitioners.

European Journal of Public Health - Camilla Parker