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This study examines the experiences of relatives of people suffering from long-term mental illness. The impetus and context for this study has been provided by the well publicised Regional Health Authority sponsored closure programmes of Friern and Claybury Psychiatric Hospitals. These planned closures have emerged from several decades of a fairly consistent, nation wide, shift of services from the old hospital sites to the community. The study has taken place amid a certain amount of confusion about the future direction of Community Care policy. In an attempt to grapple with this, the particular focus for the thesis is the experiences of relatives of people who in past decades might have found their homes within the Asylums, had they not been closing. It is argued that study around this group provides valuable insight into current difficulties. On a policy level it is argued that it has been, albeit largely unacknowledged, anxiety about 'the family' that has been significantly orchestrating the broad sweep of mental health policy changes, certainly since the middle of the last century. A review and critique of previous models used to study 'families and mental illness' is provided. Their failure to capture vital aspects of the relatives' experiences is highlighted. The roots of this failure are charted within the dominant paradigms of social science and their social and political contexts. Using material from in depth interviews the devices employed by relatives to construct and attach meaning to their experiences are explored. It is argued that relatives are involved in a negotiation of meaning within the discourses that surround them. The relatives' experiences are examined in terms of the complex grief process, the experience of shame and the encounter with stigma which all take place within the framework of meaning provided by 'the family'. Here, as these apparently intimate affects are explored, and their social significance highlighted it becomes clear that the traditional paradigms of social science that, for example make great distinction between psychological and sociological levels of understanding, are insufficient.

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An exploration of the relationship between patterns of social interaction and social work practice which incorporates thirteen publications. The thread running throughout is the way in which new forms of social care practice are made possible by cross-boundary linkages. A 'Critical Review' sets the context and analyses the works. This is followed by the first published work which applies anthropological models to the study of social marginalisation. The second publication introduces the social network concept and investigates patterns of reciprocity and dependency in social care. The next section of the thesis consists of a 'commentary' on the Griffiths and Wagner Reports. This is followed by a closely related work arguing that there is a fundamental opposition between market and network models of social and community care. The thesis then looks at the ways the culture concept can be used to illuminate the cross-boundary practices associated with community care. The concept of culture and its relationship to cross-boundary working is developed more fully in the next section where it is argued that collaboration culture is paradoxical because it incorporates both respect for difference and a commitment to collective action and that resolving this paradox through collaborative work is a complex and skilled activity. The next section introduces a comparative dimension and suggests that studies of collaboration could be based on looking at the ways in which modern welfare systems try to solve the problem of potential fragmentation and lack of coherence. The work which follows on from this makes use of discourse analysis and network analysis to compare and contrast the rhetoric of partnership and collaboration with the way in which individuals think about their day-to-day cross-boundary work. This raises questions about the changing nature of working relationships in the field of social care and is followed by an investigation into the nature and effects of globalisation on social work in Europe. 'The Co-operation Concept in a Team of Swedish Social Workers' is an attempt to develop a cross-national framework for the analysis of community care focused on the cross-boundary networks of a team of hospital based social workers in Stockholm. The thesis then returns to somewhat broader concerns by means of a work which investigates the contribution of theories of social interaction to theories of social work. These concerns permeate the penultimate section on networking but in a more applied and specific way. The book which constitutes this section of the thesis argues that there is a distinctive theory of networking and that it can be applied to the whole range of social welfare and social care specialisms. The final work explores the impact of globalisation on the ways in which social workers currently experience their roles and develop their sense of professional identity.

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