Week 2 DQs and Summary

Why is investing in mental health important to your role as a human service professional?

Which of the five characteristics listed in the text for human service professionals do you think is most important? Explain why.

Why is investing in mental health important to your role as a human service professional?

I strongly believe that investigating and understanding mental health is a must to a human service professional. Because before working on a situation we must know the actual situation. We should not work on guess. To give the proper help to the clients it is important to know their history and mentality. They could have any side which need special care such as endeavouring suicide. A service professional should give the best help and to do this they need to all about client as far as possible. They should ask their clients about their different side such as diagnosis, medications and so on. A human service professional must know about their client’s family, relatives, friends, background, community, culture by asking questions. These will help to make the client successful. Any professional should look try to get facts to ensure success.

Getting facts need some techniques and skill. Professional needs to know the way of asking right questions. Questions should be such that they will be time affective and provide necessary information.

The most challenging part is that every human are different from others. A human service professional needs to interact with different types of people. They are from different types of families, different background. Some people may have either mental or physical illness. They have to meet people of different ages, different mentalities. So it is a must to know the mental health of these different types of people by adopting proper way of investigating.

Which of the five characteristics listed in the text for human service professionals do you think is most important? Explain why.

A human service professional should be self-aware, able to communicate effectively, empathetic, Responsible and Flexible. Being a self-aware is a lifelong process. It is achieved by understanding and researching of behaviours, values, beliefs, tradition, attitudes of oneself. A professional is said able to communicate effectively when he can understand the mentality, characteristics, behaviour and feelings though the messages of client. Empathetic individuals are those who are able to accept and become intimate with clients easily. It helps the human service professional to examine the condition of client from the clients’ point of view. Professionals are said to be responsible when they give the highest priority to their client’s need and demand whereas they are said flexible when they are able to shift the view or attitude of client. Among these five qualifications being a responsible professional in most important to me. The clients come to a professional believing that the professional will help them. So the professional also should act in a way that they can do something do for that. If they are failed to show that they will lose their identity as a helper. A client relies on helper for help and instruction so the helper also should be committed to help them. Professional should enough honest and reliable to help their client.

The attitude, behaviour of professionals should be such that their client will trust them and tell them every detail about their problems without any hesitation. If the professional is failed to be trustworthy to his client they will not facts about the problem. Honesty is a must to get feedback and cooperation from client.

Communication and responding is another most important factor that influences the success of the professional. Professional should be skilled enough in communication to get right and sufficient information from the clients. If the professional lacks in communication skill he cannot work properly in helping. Actually this skill is required for every other profession also.

A professional should be smart enough to detect the lies of clients as sometimes clients lie to their professional. It can be understood from the body language, movement, tone etc. Actually it needs proper attentiveness, practice and sharpness of professionals.

Empathy is important to understand the client’s need and be able to help them properly. If professional can be empathetic the client can feel that it is really helpful for them and they cooperate.

The behaviour of professional should be such that the clients don’t think that the helper is biased or disgusted. Behaving positively and unbiased is very important during interview. So professionals should be careful with their body language to attain trust of their clients.

Being flexible is important to ensure cooperation of trust of the client. Helper has to do work hard but they should compromise with their time for wellbeing of the client. They should maintain a personal and good relationship with their clients and shouldn’t be very strict.

It can be concluded that all of these five qualities are important for a human service professional.

Week 2 summary

Assisting others to know something or to solve problems or to do any works is defined as helping. People who want to be helpers must have certain values, behaviors, thinking, philosophies. A helper is called service professional in human service. They need to conduct varieties of duties with varieties of people. A human service professional needs to interact with different types of clients and professionals. They aim to make people’s life more comfortable and help people to satisfy their particular needs. This is the primary objective of human service profession. The next most important objective of human service professionals is to discover themselves through this profession. They can uncover more about their thoughts, behaviors. This work also helps them to enhance their skill and knowledge. A human service professional need to be careful as intensive care is needed to identify the particular needs of people properly. People choose this profession not for money. They choose it because they experienced such type of incident. They seek to give service to people as they gained from their professionals. They are interested in counselling or assisting the client. Sometimes this willing create a peculiar problem. The problem is that the professional’s expectation and the client’s act are not same. Some clients are not willing to co-operate the professional. This makes the professionals angry and disappointed. A human service professional get the self-satisfaction by helping their clients. Their happiness lies in the improvement of the clients. Hey feel satisfied when they think that they are helping people to make their life more convenient and meaningful. Every client differs from others in thinking, families, backgrounds etc. their problems are not also same. So the professionals need to handle every situation in a deferent way to be successful. People also enter this field who like to control others or become the boss. They usually choose the position of administration or manager. If the professionals cannot make the client to be independent there will be problem. They should not change their own values (An Introduction to Human Services, 2011).

Woodside, M., &McClam, T. (2011). An introduction to human services (7th ed.). Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole, Cengage.