Strategies for Work With Involuntary Clients

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Often in their careers, social workers will encounter clients who are either legally required to attend treatment services or are otherwise coerced or pressured into those services. Practitioners in settings from prisons to emergency rooms to nursing homes to child protection agencies will find themselves with involuntary clients. In an update to this classic text, social workers Ronald H. Rooney and Rebecca G. Mirick explore the best ways to work with unwilling clients. While work with involuntary clients is common, it can be challenging, frustrating, and unproductive unless practitioners are well trained for it. This book provides a theoretical framework for understanding the legal, ethical, and practical concerns when working with involuntary clients, offering theory, treatment models, and specific practice strategies influenced by the best available knowledge. Animated by case studies across diverse settings, these resources can be used by practitioners to facilitate collaborative, effective working relationships with involuntary clients.

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Many practitioners encounter involuntary clients who are legally mandated to find counselling, such as juvenile offenders on probation, or who, as in the case of an alcoholic threatened by family desertion, are pressured to seek help . The end result is often considerable resistance and reluctance. Social work and other helping professions have tended to ignore or overlook this problem, and professional training assumes that most clients are self-selected and voluntary. Ronald Rooney's guide offers the first comprehensive and practical methodology for work with involuntary clients. Presenting socialization and contracting techniques similar to those used in task-centered social work, Rooney seeks to enable the practitioner to lead the involuntary client to a more voluntary and co-operative relationship. He also addresses the problems of the involuntary practitioner and gives advice on how to avoid blaming clients and burning out .