Clinical drift in social work is the slow, structural narrowing of a profession founded on social justice into one that defaults to clinical practice. Joe Wernau, LMSW, founder of The Macro Lens, has built his career around documenting how it happens and what it costs. In this interview, he explains why 54% of MSW students […]
Social Work Futurist: Strategic Foresight for the Future of Social Work
Social work is built to respond to what’s happening right now, but what if the profession spent more time preparing for what’s coming next? That’s the work of a social work futurist: using tools from strategic foresight to scan for early signals of change, map out multiple possible futures, and help practitioners and agencies get […]
Financial Boundaries Social Workers Struggle to Set (and How to Build Them)
In the first two posts in this series, we explored why financial stress in social work goes deeper than low pay, and how the money beliefs we developed in childhood shape our financial behavior through the Relationship → Behavior → Circumstances chain. Today, I want to focus on one of the most common behavioral expressions […]
AI Tools for Therapists: 12 Questions with Kym Tolson, LCSW
The conversation around AI tools for therapists has never been more urgent, or more complicated. In the span of just a few years, artificial intelligence has moved from a distant abstraction to a daily presence in clinical practice: drafting notes, generating treatment plan language, powering chatbots that millions of people are already using for emotional […]
Forensic Social Work: Where Human Need Meets Legal Consequence – An Interview with Tireeka Watson, LCSW
TL;DR Forensic social work is where clinical practice meets the legal system – courtrooms, corrections, child welfare, and reentry The forensic role is fundamentally different from the therapeutic one: the court is your primary client, not the individual Objectivity and compassion are not opposites; the best forensic practitioners bring both Trauma-informed practice matters even more […]
