Critical Commentary: Health, Disability and Social Work: New Directions in Social Work Research

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed a massive explosion of interest in health, well-being and the embodied nature of social experience. The signs of this are all around us. Complementary, holistic, mind/body therapies are increasingly popular and, in the UK, stories about everything from obesity and ‘size zero’ models to celebrity drug and alcohol misuse seem to dominate parts of the media. At the same time, the academic world has witnessed some of the most intense scientific/philosophical/theological debates about the nature, meaning and purpose of human life to have taken place since the ‘evolution versus the bible’ debates of the late-nineteenth century and all these have, to some extent, also been debates about the relationship between humanity and the human body. The sheer pervasiveness of the cultural debate about bodies and embodiment has meant that all aspects of social work have been affected by it and, in the UK, its impact has certainly not been confined to those working in the new ‘adults’ social services departments. The recent UNICEF report which showed children in the UK and the USA at the bottom of a list of developed countries in terms of a range of indicators of health and well-being (UNICEF, 2007) provoked considerable soul-searching by commentators, in the course of which ‘health and happiness’ became linked to almost every aspect of growing up in our society, including crime, violence, the persistence of child poverty and the perceived ‘breakdown’ of family life.

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