Toward the end of every year, we like to step back and take a look at the social work profession through a longer lens. Social workers, like all busy professionals, tend to get buried in the minutiae of their work and lose sight of the bigger picture. We find that it helps our colleagues to maintain perspective by taking an annual long look at the profession as a whole and the important work that social workers are engaged in.

Nearly 500,000 people died from opioid overdoses from 1999-2019. This epidemic of opioid overdose deaths can be outlined in three distinct waves.

1. The first wave began with increased prescribing of opioids in the 1990s, with overdose deaths involving prescription opioids (natural and semi-synthetic opioids and methadone) increasing since at least 1999.
2. The second wave began in 2010, with rapid increases in overdose deaths involving heroin.
3. The third wave began in 2013, with significant increases in overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids, particularly those involving illicitly manufactured fentanyl. More than 14,000 deaths involving illicitly manufactured synthetics occurred in 2019, which is equivalent to about 38 deaths per day.

The history of social work is replete with religious organizations that were the early founders of social work and prayed for, with, and over clients as a matter of course. However, as secular and governmental social service agencies assumed a greater share of society’s burden of need issues of religious freedom and separation of church and state began to crop up.

Juvenile Justice caseworkers manage cases for "best case" outcomes and "case closed" status. When they are assigned a client, the case worker monitors and supports that youth from their first offense through juvenile court, detentions and residential or other out-of-home placements. The progress of a youth through the juvenile justice system is often long and arduous from intake, booking, and registration to court action, fines, detention, sentencing, probation, and residential placement. Frequently, these same youthful offenders are "cross-over" cases that have come to the attention of both child protective services and juvenile justice case workers.

Foster Care to Adoption

Of the 428,000 children in foster care in the U.S., over 30% cannot be returned to their families and are waiting to be adopted. 135,000 children are adopted each year and there are currently 1.5 million adopted children in the United States. 59% are from the child welfare (or foster) system. Children enter foster care through no fault of their own because they have been abused, neglected or abandoned. These children are in the temporary custody of the state while their birth parents are given the opportunity to complete services that will allow the children to be returned to them if it is in the children’s best interest. Unfortunately, 30% of them never make it.

Social workers Dre’ Johnson and Renee Brean are part of a pioneering new approach to policing in Rochester, New York. They belong to the city's “person in crisis” team – a unit of mental health and behavioral professionals who attend police calls where a person may be suffering a mental health episode.

The premise behind the "person in crisis" team is simple: it contends that for all their training and skills, police are not equipped to deal with the complexities that a mental health crisis requires. By sending mental health professionals along to 911 calls that may involve potential psychological breakdowns, officials hope that these situations can be dealt with more sensitively, and more safely.

As social workers keep their heads down tirelessly toiling away on individual case work, we thought it might be helpful to share with them the "big picture" perspective of their profession published by the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) as its 2021 Blueprint of Federal Social Policy Priorities. It articulates meaningful actions our society should take to address the COVID-19 crisis, promote mental and behavioral health, eliminate systemic racism, and ensure civil and human rights for all. In case you missed it, here is a summary of your profession's "big picture" wish list for 2021.

Recent discussions with social workers from six different disciplines around the country centered around the lasting effects this dreadful pandemic has had on their constituents. Everyone agreed that the novel coronavirus and associated diseases have caused unprecedented - disruption.

Your response to last week's blog on the social worker's role in juvenile justice was overwhelmingly positive but many of you thought that the issues might be better clarified in context. So, let's try to put juvenile justice in some historical perspective.

• During a single year, an estimated 2.1 million youth under the age of 18 are arrested in the United States.
• Though overall rates have been declining over the past years, approximately 1.7 million delinquency cases are disposed in juvenile courts annually.
• Youth are referred to the juvenile justice system for different types of offenses.
• The majority of youth processed through the juvenile court are adjudicated (i.e., declared by a judge to be) delinquent, for most offenses.