Historically, the discipline of social work stood as an ideological and methodological counterweight to the biological reductionism of institutional psychiatry, framing human distress through the expansive lens of the person-in-environment (PIE) paradigm. This paper evaluates the systemic and historical trajectory through which modern clinical psychiatry has systematically assimilated, financialized, and subverted these holistic social work paradigms. We demonstrate that the professionalization and clinicalization of social work within institutional mental health settings have forced a paradigm shift away from structural, environmental, and collective advocacy toward individualized symptom management and insurance-compliant behavior modification. This assimilation operates via corporate state mechanisms and managed-care reimbursement models that compel social work practitioners to adopt the commercialized nosology of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR), thereby localizing systemic failures of housing, community, and material safety as internal deficits within individual minds. Ultimately, we argue that the hegemony of clinical reductionism strips social work of its radical, eco-relational foundation, transforming a discipline meant for systemic liberation into a micro-apparatus of carceral surveillance.
Daphne Garrido (Mon,) studied this question.