My Generalist Year, taking Intro to Clinical Social Work, to practice conducting CCA’s and using the DSM-5, we were assigned a movie and using the client as the main character in the film. In this film, there was a wife who was trying to process the grief of her child whom she lost and her husband who was in a mental hospital due to how he was processing his grief of their lost child. The wife stayed home, regularly visited her husband and also worked at a grocery store.

Midway into the movie, the wife encounters a bird that will not leave her side. As she starts to find a healthy way to properly gieve and build her relationship back with her husband, she doesn’t just become better internally, but the interactions with the bird decrease. Eentually, the husband is well enough to come home and the bird eventually leaves.

This film had a significant impact with teaching me how to observe, pay attention, and practice active listening skills when working with a client when progressing to soon diagnois them or conducting a CCA. Active listening and observing are so critically important because we should be able to pay attention to body languages, tone of voice, and reading between lines that others may not be able to decifer when wanting to provide the the best services that someone is in need of.

The New Jim Crow is a book that I started to read throughout my Specialist Year. This book dates us back through systems that were created to disdvantage black and brown communities start from the late 1870s to the mid 1960s but showing us how those systems are still relevent in today’s society. We still see systems, employment for example, where black and brown communicities are discriminiated against, many times for no reason because of our skin color, though the Equal Employment Opportunity Act was established in 1972 prohibiting anyone based on skin color, ethnicity, nor gender shall be discriminated against in the work-place.

Knowing and understanding that working with minority youth, I have to be able to understand the systems that are put in place for them to fail so they can learn to overcome them and be successful. Not just educating them, but also wanting to empower them to properly chanllenge these systems. Being someone that came from a marganilized community, I want to be the example to them that the system does not define you and that you can and will always have the opportunity to be successful.

An article provided through Science Direct titled Child Welfare Caseworkers’ Perspective on the Challenges of Addressing Mental Health Problems in Early Childhood had a great impact on how I plan to coduct my future practice when working with youth. We understand that mental health is something that society is starting to speak more about and “normalize.” In many households, mental health is not something that is talked about. Many times it stems from the stignma of what mental health, assistance needs, or resources are. Many parents/guardians believe that mental health isn’t something that is “real” or you should just “deal with the issues by yourself.” Many times when therapy is brought up in these same households, it is the stigma of being “crazy” or that “something is wrong with you.”

I have known and seen how much the lack of mental health topics or are an have such detremental effects on a child not just in their childhood but as they become adults and have to function in everyday society. This article has a lot of research that truly explains and breaks down, statistically, why and how not dealing with mental health in early ages, can have such an impact; especially youth in the foster care system. This research and article assist me with emphasizing the importance of mental health and how to introduce it when working with youth. It is important to me to not have youth be another statistic.

While I create a goal to build up youth, break generational patters, uplift, and build youth, I have to know the proper practices to build and uplift them. Youth Affairs Council Victoria provided a great article about Strength Based Practice and the proper ways to use it when working with youth.

From what I learned while analyzing this article is that young people need a space that allows positive growth. While facilitating this practice, I should be actively encouraging their current skills and accomplishments, embracing their “weaknesses” as areas of growth and guiding them how to accomplish that, understanding they are still growing; mentally, pushing positive coping skills, and building on their strengths and guiding them how to truly rely on their strengths in their everyday lives.

During my Generalist Year, I took a course called Family Theory and Interventions. In the course, we really touched on different theories and modalities to use when we are working with families. To tie in this practice, we watched some episodes of a popular TV show called This Is Us. The show is about a family that soon tragically loses their father and through the process of grief, start to then explore therapy as they are reminded of flashbacks mixd with various thoughts and emotions to understand the current family issues that are happening in today’s time.

When watching the series, we focused more on the scenes that involved the therapist. It allowed us to process, after watching, the pros and cons as to what the therapist did right in our eyes and ways that they could have improved. This significantly impacted our Role Plays we did later in class because instead of reading, comprehending, and going staright to practicing, we were able to see a visual example of what “true” family therapy looks like.

Knowing I would like to work with youth, I will have times where I will have to interact and have sessions or be apart of Child and Family Teams (CFT’s) to ensure a childs success.