Has anyone every been to a Social Worker?

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What exactly do they do?

Did the social worker help?

Never really been to one but one came to be because I was having a meltdown in the nurse's office because I forgot to set my alarm so I missed my appointment and had to schedule again that same day to see another doctor and not my own because he was busy. So there went my whole routine for morning before work and I was stuck in the waiting room waiting for the appointment. I also forgot about my appointment so that's why I forgot to set my alarm but by the time I remembered, it was three minutes before my appointment so I rushed out of bed, got dressed and headed out to my car with no brushing my teeth or food. I was ten minutes late for my appointment and my doctor could not see me.

This one just tried to calm me down and asked me if I am going to be all right. I did feel like an ass because of my behavior but luckily no one said anything to me in the waiting room.

There are many types of social workers. Some come to take children away from their parents, some help hospital patients find services once they are discharged, others help people get disability benefits, and some just plain make your life miserable. Without more information to go on, I really can't offer advice.

Be careful. I have been interviewed twice by social workers as part of a homestudy process to adopt our 2 kids. Both were very nice but I could tell they were "reading between the lines." They scribbled a lot in notebooks. I think you need to have your filter up. Don't confess any secrets because it may come back on you in the future.

The closest thing I have ever come to one, was a career counsellor at Alberta Employment and Immigration and the Student Funding Officer at Red Deer College who helped me out with getting funding for my college tuition...other than that...no.

I've been to one before, but not for anything autism related. Though I think he did try to diagnose me with it near the end of our sessions, I'm pretty sure the word he actually used was "depression".

When I went there, they just asked me all sorts of questions to find out if I was crazy or not. "What year is it?" "Do you know who you are?" "Who was George Washington?" stuff like that. Later, they'd ask me about my personal feelings...we'd do games like "What's missing in this picture?" and I had to rearrange a bunch of blocks to match a given pattern, stuff like that. Then sometimes they'd talk to my parents for a bit.

That's about the gist of it, from what I can remember.

Social workers are trained in diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of disorders and they are also trained in a "community model" of treatment. Some do work with children and foster care, but more often than not, you will see an LCSW treating a mental illness. I see an LCSW now because I want help with a relationship issue--i.e. why do I keep attracting the same loser people who can't keep their word to me. He is extremely good and took 3 pages of notes in our first session. He gave me a lot of good material to think about too.

One problem with this is that social workers are generally trained in psychodynamics. This method tries to find the unconscious sources of emotions and work out the difficulties from them. This approach is useful for lots of NTs. It useless for people with autism, given that our subconscious minds are not preoccupied with emotions and our difficulties in identifying them in the first place. Behavioral and cognitive behavioral approaches are better for us because they work with out conscious minds.

I have had too many experiences with social workers and social services. Most of the "professionals" I saw were a bunch of Freudian hacks
who were trying to figure out what was "wrong" with me. Back then a different brain was a damaged brain.