Clinical Social Work and the Biomedical Industrial Complex

This article examines how the biomedical industrial complex has ensnared social work within a foreign conceptual and practice model that distracts clinical social workers from the special assistance that they can provide for people with mental distress and misbehavior. We discuss (1) social work's assimilation of psychiatric perspectives and practices during its pursuit of professional status, (2) the persistence of psychiatric hospitalization despite its coercive methods, high cost, and doubtful efficacy, (3) the increasing reliance on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders despite its widely acknowledged scientific frailty, and (4) the questionable contributions of psychoactive drugs to clinical mental health outcomes and their vast profits for the pharmaceutical industry, using antipsychotic drugs as a case example. We review a number of promising social work interventions overshadowed by the biomedical approach. We urge social work and other helping professions to exercise intellectual independence from the reigning paternalistic drug‐centered biomedical ideology in mental health and to rededicate themselves to the supportive, educative, and problem‐solving methods unique to their disciplines.