life is a crap shoot and social workers exist to increase the odd that life will be beeter

On Social Work: In as much as we have structures with specific professional roles working there, such as courts, we have or must create the institutions that will have social workers as an intrinsic part of their functioning. Those left out of a society that is more and more fragmented, without family support and with a job market that has become progressively less secure, as it appears that those at the top want everyone to be a individual indentured to whatever little jobs they can get, those, I say, need social workers, because we know how to maneuver the bureaucracies that gets them housing and food and medication and mental health. Not every depressed person needs  medication but could sure use some words of kindness WITH the assistance that will make their sadness diminish, be it group therapy, better resources or how to think through a problem. Do psychiatrists know how to help someone with housing difficulties? Does a lawyer know how to deal with a woman who lives in a room with three children and cannot afford to get better housing? Does a psychologist know how to get that woman to the right places, and as a result, get the woman better housing, help her get training, and thus give her a possible future, not doomed to destitution? We are multilayered and multitaskers, we know who and how to talk to the right people, and get training in networking resources that together, constitute and substitute for what a functional well off family, an extended one, used to do and still does! Are we ignoring that we are the ones who deal with the problems of the child who is abused, the frail elderly who has no place to go, the person who wants to get out of a life where alcohol and other substances have become the only thing in their lives, robbed of home, family and dignity. Anybody who thinks that social work is a profession in extinction is either not looking around them, or living in a fantasy land where there are no poor, no homeless, no migrant refugees, no undocumented immigrants, no abused children, no beaten women who have to leave in the silence of the night lest they be killed by the beast next to them. Can I move to that idyllic place? I'll happily find a new profession because they will be Abundant, housing affordable, sick leave paid for, eduction free and should I become ill, I will not need a social worker to find me a way to get affordable medication, food delivered to my house or even a home assistant or transportation that will take me to the places I'll need to go to. Oh, and yes, I can sure use some words of kindness, therapy if you will, not the "god only gives you what you can take or cancer can be a blessing in disguise" type of worn out and offensive clichés, but researched and well thought out manners of saying words which will leave me thinking that maybe I am not such a useless piece of garbage. That's what I do every day, because the world I live in is an unfriendly one to those who have bad luck and bad timing. Shoot, who wouldn't have liked to have been born to a wealthy resourceful family? But we don't get to choose. Life is a crap shoot and social workers exist to increase the odds at a better life. There, that's my defense of social work for today!