Meds Money and Manners or Discretionary Time

Meds, Money, and Manners: The Case Management of Severe Mental Illness

Author: Jerry E Floersch

As case management has replaced institutional care for mental health patients in recent decades, case management theory has grown in complexity and variety of models. But how are these models translated into real experience? How do caseworkers use both textbook and practical knowledge to assist clients with managing their medication and their money? Using ethnographic and historical-sociological methods, Meds, Money, and Manners: The Case Management of Severe Mental Illness uncovers unexpected differences between written and oral accounts of case management in practice. In the process, it suggests the possibility of small acts of resistance and challenges the myth of social workers as agents of state power and social control.

Booknews

Having worked with and studied case managers while they mobilized resources in a mental health organization to enable former hospital patients to continue living in communities, Floersch (social service administration, U. of Chicago), describes how they use case management theory called continuum-of-care or community reintegration to produce apartment-dwelling consumers of mental health services. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Tables
	Acknowledgments
Ch. 1	Introduction	1
Ch. 2	The Formation of Community Support Services	17
Ch. 3	The Rise of the Case Manager	42
Ch. 4	Strengths Case Management	61
Ch. 5	Landscape for a Case Manager: The Carless Mentally Ill	83
Ch. 6	Oral and Written Narratives of Case Managers	108
Ch. 7	Money	125
Ch. 8	Meds	150
Ch. 9	The Helper Habitus: Situated Knowledge and Case Management	180
Ch. 10	Conclusion	202
App. A	Methods, Data, and Analysis: A Critical-Realist Perspective	215
App. B	Continuum of Services	221
App. C	Interview Schedule	223
	Notes	227
	References	235
	Index	249

Interesting book: The Cultures of Caregiving or The Global Resistance Reader

Discretionary Time: A New Measure of Freedom

Author: Robert E Goodin

A healthy work-life balance has become increasingly important to people trying to cope with the pressures of contemporary society. This trend highlights the fallacy of assessing well-being in terms of finance alone; how much time we have matters just as much as how much money. The authors of this book have developed a novel way to measure 'discretionary time': time which is free to spend as one pleases. Exploring data from the US, Australia, Germany, France, Sweden and Finland, they show that temporal autonomy varies substantially across different countries and under different living conditions. By calibrating how much control people have over their time, and how much they could have under alternative welfare, gender or household arrangements, this book offers a new perspective for comparative cross-national enquiries into the temporal aspects of human welfare.