The Life Model of Social Work Practice

Rating:
Summary: The start of an unfortunate legacy
Review: This book is the intellectual cornerstone of most generalist model social work education in the United States. In that respect it exemplifies much of what wrong (and there is a great deal wrong) with the generalist model. This is a book that social work educators seem to like. However, when you ask most students or practitioners, the response is less enthusiastic.

Where I went to school it was considered heresy to criticize the life model, because it is a "major" theory that belongs uniquely to social work. That's too bad, because if this is a high point of social work theory, then it speaks poorly for our intellectual base.

The life model, like the social work profession, seems organized around being as inclusive as possible in the service unity. This harkens back to the social work profession arising out of the unification of several diverse, often fractious social welfare movements. Inclusiveness is important to social work as a defining value of the profession. But in the attempt to be as inclusive as possible, the life model dilutes itself as a usefull basis for intervention.

The life model rests on the astonishingly obvious premise that aspects of the persons biopsychosocial ecology interact; and that intervening in the that ecology may have a salutary effect on the client. What's worse, the theory treats this understanding as if it were some kind of end point, rather than a basic underpinning of understanding human behavior. I have yet to hear anyone tell me how this theory informs what you do with a live human being sitting with you in a clinical setting. What good do we do our trainees to be educating them with model? What good do we do our clients?

If social workers are to join our professional cousins in the modern world it needs to move beyond simplistic and obvious theories like the life model. Intellectual inclusiveness does not have to mean being general to the point of irrelevance. The continued promulgation of this theory in social work education dilutes our strength. We live in a time when, more than ever, our society and our clients need us to be thoughtful as well as compassionate. We need to do better than this.