ESSAY: Social Work Practice With Couples and Family Systems

Depression

Identify the issue you selected.
Describe the community resource you selected.
Explain how it provides primary, secondary, and/or tertiary services or resources specifically for families and couples.
Explain any gaps that may exist.
Explain how you might address these gaps. Be specific.

ANSWER

Social Work Practice with Couples and Family Systems

Selected Issue – Depression

The selected issue is depression, which has become a common mental health concern, especially in family setups. It can be defined as a mood disorder that entails a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest in initially interesting things. Some common experiences that may make a person to be depressed include job loss, bereavement, failing to meet expectations, and many more. In couples, the reasons are even more diverse, and they include infertility, infidelity from a once-trusted partner, unmanageable children, among others. When instances of depression happen in a family, it may be challenging to maintain a relationship, especially if adequate measures are not put in place to control the extent of the depression (Johnson et al., 2017). Many remedies can be used when such cases arise. One useful one is the use of community resources, as discussed herein.

Selected Community Resource

The identified community resource is social work practice with couples and family systems. This kind of practice entails the use of social work values, techniques, and principles as a way of providing tangible services to people affected with a specific issue. The primary mandate of this practice is to advocate for better social and health relations within communities. While undertaking their roles, social workers use the knowledge of human development and behavior, cultural orientations, and other legislative considerations in offering solutions to problems in society (Knobloch et al., 2016). It is for these reasons that the practice will be utilized in seeking to reduce depression in couples and family systems.

How it provides services specifically for families and couples Undertaking therapy for couples is one of the difficult tasks for any therapy process. However, Social work practice has always found great utility when dealing with issues that affect couples or families. The first step that social work practice does is to inform the couples of the goals of any therapy process. Secondly, the social worker will try through all ways possible to establish trust between the two parties seeking counseling or any form of therapy. Once trust has been built, the social worker will establish some boundaries that will allow each family member/ partner to understand how free he/she is in contributing to the therapy session. Great communication styles are established and hence allow free flow of information (Olvera, 2018). Social workers may also have a session…