Personal Beliefs and Biases

Personal Beliefs and Biases
By:
[student’s name]
[course]
[university]
[date]
Personal Beliefs and Biases
Social workers are people, too. Like most people, we are socialized and educated into certain norms and behaviours. On one hand, these norms enable us to feel that we belong to a certain community. As a social worker, these norms help us deliver services better - they enable us to sympathize and empathize because we share the same values with others. Unfortunately, norms are not universal. In the same way that certain actions (e.g. kissing, raising one’s thumb to do an okay sign, etc.) can have different meanings for different cultures, so do norms change depending on the community one belongs to. Social workers today realize the importance of multicultural practice, and the need to treat each patient as a unique individual, who may or may not adhere to the norms of his or her own community.
What makes social work difficult is that one has to accept every consumer who comes to him or her for help, do everything he or she can to help his patient, while at the same time not imposing solutions and respecting the patient’s values. In order for a social worker to perform what is expected of him or her, he or she must learn about his or her own personal beliefs and biases that could affect his or her service delivery. For example, in my own experience, some of my clients try to indoctrinate me to their own beliefs, and my response is almost always the same: either I create a category for the specific client, "easy to process, needs more processing, difficult to process, impossible to process" or I shut out everything the client says when it starts to affect me personally. I only know this now simply because I tried to analyze why the methodologies I use work for some, and doesn’t work for others. I realized that often, I am able to build a stronger connection with my clients if I was interested to help them in the first place, which in turn helps them overcome their conditions simply because they feel that someone cares for them. I realize that often, the healing process begins with me. In order for me to realize that, I had to go deep into my own values and biases, and I had to discover what made me truly care for certain patients, and not for others?
I know through the article of Tennille, Solomon, and Blank ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData" : { "DOI" : "10.1007/s10597-010-9326-0", "ISBN" : "1573-2789", "ISSN" : "00103853", "PMID" : "20549558", "abstract" : "Following a randomized trial of case manager delivered HIV prevention intervention to persons with severe mental illness (SMI), this study sought to document changes within the service environment and with case managers themselves as a result of their experience and skills training. Utilizing qualitative methods, researchers conducted focus groups and in-depth interviews with 22 case managers and 3 administrators at an urban community mental health center. Beyond confirming previously established barriers to case manager delivery of HIV prevention interventions for persons with SMI, most noteworthy was the finding that case managers were generally unskilled in conducting asse...