Work, employment, and mental illness: expanding the domain of Canadian social work.

Despite established evidence that work and employment are an important component of recovery for people who experience mental illness, social work education in Canada seldom offers graduate training or courses on the significance of work in peoples' lives or on the practices involved in helping to gain and retain employment for these individuals. In this article the authors argue that the high levels of unemployment among people who experience mental illness, and the rising incidence of mental health and addictions issues in workplaces, offer the opportunity, as well as the mandate, for social work educators to provide professional education in the area of employment support and assistance.

An evaluation of a suicide bereavement peer support program.

Peer support, a cornerstone in recovery programs for mental illness and addiction, has not been widely applied to service programs for survivors of suicide. In 2004-2006 Canadian Mental Health Association Suicide Services in Calgary, Alberta, introduced the Peer Support Program for adults, an adjunct to conventional individual and group intervention. This article reports on a mixed-methods evaluation of the Peer Support Program. Hogan's Grief Response Checklist and the qualitative data tracked positive outcomes for both the peer supporters and the clients. This study challenges the unspoken assumption that survivors of suicide, due to their vulnerability, require the services of highly skilled professionals and would not be in a position to offer unsupervised support to peers. Rather it supports an intervention protocol that consists of peer supporters and professionals working collaboratively to offer cost-effective, client-centered services.

Occasioning learning in the workplace: the case of interprofessional peer collaboration.

In this study, we explore the potential of peer collaboration as a means of promoting continuous learning at work. Six peer collaboration groups comprised of 18 employees in a large urban health region in Canada participated in small collaborative inquiry groups over a period of 6 - 8 months. Using a collective case study design, each group provided one instrumental case that when combined with the other five served a supportive role in studying peer collaboration in continuous professional education. In this article, drawing on analysis of transcribed group conversations, we provide portraits of two interprofessional peer groups for in-depth discussion and further illustration. While one group used peer collaboration to: (1) retrace and reconsider their practical judgments; and (2) identify and explore breakdowns in practice, the other group demonstrated that peer collaboration can provide a space in which to identify and explore issues related to (1) workplace conflict, (2) professional boundaries and (3) emotional pain. The power of peer collaboration as an informal vehicle for continuous learning seems to lie in interprofessional conversation. This study suggests that unstructured but focused conversations about daily practice, among close colleagues from other professions, can yield surprising possibilities for learning.

Survivors of suicide. Emerging counseling strategies.

1. Effective intervention with survivors of suicide requires knowledge of the diverse sequelae of response including blame, anger, guilt, shame, search for why, and feelings of stigmatization. 2. Fearing blame and stigmatization, survivors of suicide may be reluctant to contact helping professionals. 3. Duration and intensity of bereavement is mediated by the survivors' nature of the relationship with the deceased and their perception of the preventability of the death. 4. Group counseling is an effective intervention because it addresses the issue of disenfranchised grief.