Task Strategies: An Empirical Approach to Clinical Social Work (Book).

TASK Strategies (Book); REID, William J.; PSYCHOLOGICAL stress; TASK performance; SOCIAL work research; BOOKS & reading

The article focuses on the book "Task Strategies: An Empirical Approach to Clinical Social Work," by William J. Reid. The book offers examples of the application of task-centered practice to problems frequently encountered by clinical social workers including difficulties of families and children, anxiety, depression, alcohol abuse, inadequate resources and psychosocial problems associated with mental and physical illness. The book describes and refines the fundamental principles of task-centered practice and includes examples of practice evaluation strategies. The text is designed for use by practitioners, educators and students in social work and related professions. For reasons some critics attack practice books that emphasize practice procedure. "Too simplistic," they say, "human behavior is too complicated and unique to be dealt with in such a cookbook way." Perhaps this kind of faulty thinking accounts for the wide disparity between social work and medicine, physics, computers, biology, and engineering in terms of technological advancement. The book by Reid is not a cookbook. The methods described in the book require amplification by an expert.