hello,
I am the typist and not the person who made this comment but they have ok'ed me to paste onto this forum...

"Hey,
I've found an even better workd to throw at them.

HEGEMONY.

Hegemony means the ascendancy or domination of one power over another. In a critical social science interprestation, it refers to the ways in which some social systems, and the people in them, give the impression that they are unassailable, and that the conditions they have produced are not only good, but also appropriate for the people over whom they have control.

Now that sounds exactly like our f govt dept.

As an example, in nursing, it means that nurses come to think that the hospital bureaucracy is not only necessary, but also conducive to their welfare, and that the oppressive elements, such as domination relationships and challenging or difficult work conditions, can't and shouldn't be changed. Hegemony works to have nurses believe thaey can do little to change their work lives. Hegemonic influences work to maintain the status quo and resist change.

So in terms of docs, this could be seen to also be in play. their culture is such that the staff apprear to be so indocrinated that they do not even think to question any of the processes - 'word's are enough??!!' & continue to get victims of their system to meet continuing insurmountable and ever-changing goal posts. At what point do the staff stop and thnk to question that if someone has met the goal prosts (eg provided clean urines, attend counselling etc), then perhaps substance use/ misuse is NOT an issue, or hand this issue over to the repsected experts in this field, rather than dictate to that field of expertise what docs think they should be doing.
remember that beautiful line frequently coming from CSO's 'i'll have to speak to my supervisor'. Why. Why is that so?
Because they don't have a brain themselves. because they are so unsure of their work that they con't know what to do? Because they are so under the hegemonistic influence that they cannot make a decision on their own - yet these same people are put in charge of 'cases'. Not to mention they come out to your house and decide to remove the child.
And that is another issue. Is it nice to be known as a 'case'. That hegemonistic way of depersonalizing the damage done to distance themselves from the pain they cause. It's a bit like working in an operating theatre. When a person is covered in green sterile drapes and the body is cut open, it's not gorey because it's only a square of flesh that it seen. It's cut off from the big picture.
sorry, i feel like I am egging you on, and firing you up. that's not the intention. If you are writing to anyone these are terms that describe some of docs policies and procedures that need to be reconsidered.

reification is another one. That means making into a thing. It is the taking of essential activites and treating them as if they operated according to a given set of laws independently of the wishes of the people engaged in the activities. Kind of like the laws of social life. So a nurse might do things that would indicate she is deferring to a doctor, putting him in a place of power, even if she doesn't agree with it - it's about assumptions - which docs seem to do a lot of.

Emancipation = freedon. Inference that one is freed FROM something and free TOWARDS something. So emancipating persons to be liverated from their present oppressive conditions to be freed towards empowering conditions.

The whole problem with that is that docs are not about empowerment at all. At what point do they even attempt to five parents any power over their lives and stop destabilising the whole process by docs decisioins.Empowerment is abouthelping people find their own pwer. Dcos just treat parents like children they have stolen and shove them from pillar to post as well. granted that there are some parents out there that need a lot of assistance in learning how to parent more effectively - so why not work side by side with that parent, or employ people who are experts at that. I'm sorry, but I fail to see how anyone who has not even given birth can make a decision on whether someone is "god enough" to be a parent.. "Good enough" is the benchmark set by the majority of literature around parenting through post-natal depression. A shame it is not the benchmark set by docs. When have docs published research papers on their success rates of their processes. Have they done longitudinal studies about the positive outcomes of the children they 'saved' by tearing those very chidren's lives apart at an early age, then moving them frequently into situations that sometimes were more damaging than the family home. where are the glowing statistics on the fine members of adult society they turned these children into?"

...The above written is not from my head but plagiarized from an email sent to me by a friend who works extensively with shared clients with docs.