Contingent Control and Wild Moments: Conducting Psychiatric Evaluations in the Home

When social control and social service workers go into the field, into the "native habitat" of some problem, a variety of tacit structures and controls that mark office work with its standardized documents and formal meetings are weakened or absent entirely. As a result, compared to office...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Emerson, Robert M. 1940- (Author)
Contributors: Pollner, Melvin
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Interlibrary Loan:Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany)
Published: 2019
In: Social Inclusion
Year: 2019, Volume: 7, Issue: 1, Pages: 259-268
Further subjects:B frontline decision-making
B clientization
B Social Control
B Home visits
B field psychiatry
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Summary:When social control and social service workers go into the field, into the "native habitat" of some problem, a variety of tacit structures and controls that mark office work with its standardized documents and formal meetings are weakened or absent entirely. As a result, compared to office settings, social control work in field settings tends to become open, contingent, unpredictable, and on occasion even wild. This article provides a strategic case study of the distinctive features of social control decision-making in the field, drawing on observations of field work by psychiatric emergency teams (PET) from the 1970s. PET typically went to the homes of psychiatrically-troubled persons in order to conduct evaluations for involuntary mental hospitalization. This article will analyze the varied, situationally-sensitive practices these workers adopted to evaluate such patients in their own homes.
ISSN:2183-2803
Contains:Enthalten in: Social Inclusion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.17645/si.v7i1.1788