How do systems work?

One of the obstacles to satisfying and fulfilling functioning is the lack of understanding of how systems work. Most of the systems that comprise modern life are complicated and thus confusing, frustrating, anxiety inducing, and can seem overwhelming. As a Psychiatric Social Worker I spend a lot of effort and energy in helping clients navigate the various systems that can provide the resources for them to meet their needs and are requiring some degree of compliance, cooperation, and behavior. This assistance requires that the Psychiatric Social Worker understands how these systems work. This understanding requires education and experience. This understanding of how systems work is a major component of Social Work competence.

The assistance in navigating systems is sometimes referred to as “empowerment.” Empowerment involves three activities: providing information, teaching skills, and providing opportunities to use that information and those skills.

What are the major systems that people function within in our current society? Some of them are education, health, legal, economic, recreational, media, social welfare, and political. Within these domains there are multiple subsystems.

Here on Markham’s Behavioral Health we will be exploring how these various systems work and how they can best be navigated to obtain what resources they provide to improve a person and their family’s functioning.

The overarching question is how do these systems affect a person and community’s mental health?

Michel Foucault called these systems “discourses.” Discourse analysis involves several components of the discourse: knowledge, skills, values, expert representatives of the discourse. One of Foucault’s great contributions was to analyze discourses historically and trace their development in society over time usually involving a couple of centuries or more. Understanding discourse development historically gives the student a better understanding of how the discourse’s knowledge, skills, values, and expertise evolved and came to be what they are today.

The first discourse to be described on Markham’s Behavioral Health is the health care system in the United States which is, compared to other first world countries, very dysfunctional and increasingly difficult to navigate to get one’s health care needs met. It is hoped that by better understanding the system one can better manipulate it to get one’s health care needs met and to help change it to a system that better meets the needs of the American people.