Social work students and self-care: international and UK critical perspectives

Abstract

While social work education can provide students with rewarding and satisfying experiences, there can also be stressful and demanding requirements from academic and placement work and personal circumstances. Self-care encourages students to give more attention to their own needs in order to prepare themselves for potentially demanding careers in social work organizations, where they can continue self-care practices. Self-care activities can be taken for granted. They can be defined in diverse ways; they may involve physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, personal, and professional elements. There are dangers that self-care activities can become excessively individualized, but they take place within structural, organizational, institutional, collective, and family contexts. The aims of this article are to explore definitions of self-care, to present recent international research findings about self-care in social work education and among social work students, to locate self-care in a wider organizational and societal context, to consider strengths, to critically evaluate some of the weaknesses of the concept, and to explore possible future development of self-care in social work education in the UK.

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