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Well-being is a concept which can connect together a number of important ideas that have a strong resonance for professional education and practice across the human services. This can critically include considerations of illness, crisis, and loss. Such acute moments in individuals’ lives can be examined through their precipitating events, coping mechanisms, and responses. This article explores some of the dimensions of well-being and how they facilitate a greater understanding of illness, crisis, and loss. These deliberations are then exemplified through a focus on alcohol and other drug use.

The topic of well-being is one that is receiving increasing attention in a number of academic fields and professional disciplines. It is a concept that can be used as a unifying theme to link together a number of important concepts that have significant implications for professional education and practice across the human services. This article explores different aspects of well-being, differentiates well-being from the now-stigmatized term of welfare, and argues that professional education has much to be gained from adopting a well-being approach. It presents well-being as an important basis for addressing issues relating to illness, crisis, and loss.

It is well known that bereavement presents major challenges of adjustment to the individuals so affected, but what is much less well recognized is the major challenges bereavement can present to organizations in general and their managers and human resources professionals in particular. This article explores the significance of death for the workplace and argues that organization that fail to give adequate attention to such matters will be poorly placed when it comes to promoting workplace well-being.

There is no part of human existence that loss and grief do not reach, and the workplace is no exception to this. This article is therefore concerned with some of the implications of loss and grief in work settings in general and for workplace leaders in particular. By way of example, it explores in particular the needs of bereaved caregivers returning to work and the potential for stigma to emerge in relation to employment and bereavement. Central to the article is an argument in favor of the need for change within the workplace, specifically within the structures and systems that support bereaved caregivers returning to work. This article critically reflects on the leadership management challenge of supporting bereaved caregivers returning to, or seeking, work and addressing the problem of stigma in relation to employment and bereavement. Some structural and policy changes are highlighted to assist employers and bereaved caregivers faced with this situation.

Undergoing a traumatic experience can be a life-changing event, having a significant impact on individuals, families, communities, workplaces and societies. Traumatology is therefore a complex field of study demanding a sophisticated level of understanding to serve as a theory base. This article explores the potential for existentialist philosophy to make an important contribution to our understanding of trauma and its effects. It presents trauma as an existential injury and explores the psychosocial basis of traumatic experience — that is, conceptualising trauma as having both psychological and sociological dimensions, the combination of which has profound existential resonances. While the theoretical ideas discussed can be applied to trauma at any stage in the life course, this paper focuses in particular on childhood trauma. Consequently, child abuse is used as an example of how trauma can have a significant (and detrimental) effect on identity development, invoking a need for a commitment to trauma re...

In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis on employee welfare or, as it is being referred to with increasing frequency, “workplace well-being.” Traditional approaches to such issues have tended to be either medicalized (via occupational health interventions) or individualized (for example, through employee assistance programs—EAPs). This article proposes a broader approach based on the problem-solving perspective of occupational social work. It is argued that such a broader approach offers a sounder foundation for tackling workplace problems and promoting well-being in general and for addressing the challenges of loss, grief, and trauma in the workplace in particular.

Existentialism as a school of philosophy raises important questions about meaning and purpose and other such factors traditionally associated with spirituality. It also raises important questions about death and dying and the finite nature of human existence. As such, it provides a useful platform for developing our understanding of how spirituality relates to experiences of crisis, loss, and grief. This article explores some key existentialist issues, such as the paradox of meaning, the nature of human existence, personal and social identity and authenticity, and relates each of these to the interface between spirituality on the one hand, and crisis and loss on the other.

* Summary: A review of the neglected area of the relationship between loss and grief and the less well-documented areas of discrimination in relation to age, disability and sexuality. * Findings: There is an extensive and long-standing literature base relating to loss and grief. However, the major focus of such work is predominantly psychological and individualistic in its focus. Only recently a solid body of work relating to the sociological dimensions of loss and grief has begun to build up. This new literature has largely followed the pattern of the development of anti-discriminatory practice in social work, with a major emphasis on class, race and gender, and little attention paid to the less well-established forms of discrimination such as ageism, disablism and heterosexism. * Applications: This article explores the relationship between these three forms of discrimination and loss and grief, with a view to establishing the importance of developing a broad-based anti-discriminatory practice in this important area of social work.

• Summary: This article explores models and strategies for developing empowering forms of social work practice with older people. • Findings: Social work with older people has strong roots in a predominantly medical model in which the primary objective is to ensure that care is provided. While social work with other client groups has made major steps forward in developing less medicalized approaches, the work undertaken with older people has seen far less progress. This article examines the differences between a care model and an empowerment model, identifies some of the barriers standing in the way of movement from one to the other and considers ways of responding to such barriers. • Applications: The authors identify strategies for developing empowering forms of practice.

Older people are no less prone to experiences of crisis and loss than any other age cohort. Indeed, it could be argued that this group is even more prone to such experiences, although both the therapeutic literature on crisis intervention and the thanatological literature on loss and grief pay relatively little heed to the needs and circumstances of older people. This article therefore seeks to go some way toward redressing the balance by exploring the significance of crisis and loss as part of the lived experience (le vecu) of older people. The arguments presented are set in the context of the need to recognize and challenge the significant role of ageism.

The position of children in the social order can be seen as an ambiguous one. On the one hand, they are highly valued, at a rhetorical level at least, as the basis of the future generation. On the other hand, however, they can be seen to be marginalized and disenfranchised, protected from more aspects of social life than is strictly necessary. This paper explores some of the important issues relating to children’s disenfranchised social position, with specific reference to issues relating to death, dying and bereavement.

SUMMARY This paper explores the negative impact of sexism on both women and men and considers what active part men can play in challenging and undermining sexism. The costs of living and working in a patriarchal society are outlined, and related to the differing experiences of women and men. It is argued that, although women clearly bear the brunt of sexism, gender stereotyping is not without significant costs for men. This leads us into an exploration of possible anti-sexist strategies that men can promote and implement as part of the development of anti-discriminatory and anti oppressive practice. The aim is not for men to 'colonize' or take over the struggle to achieve emancipation from oppressive gender norms. Rather, it is for men to play a part in the collective struggle to remove the inhumanity of patriarchal social relations. The paper is grounded within a professional value base premissed on a commitment to combating discrimination and oppression, and within a theory base informed by existentialist philosophy (Thompson, 1992a). The development of the Women's Movement played a major part in rais ing levels of awareness of the significance of gender in society and the extensive inequalities between the sexes in terms of the distribution of life-chances, opportunities and power. With historical roots in the suffra gette movement, women have increasingly become involved in political matters—for example the peace movement—and, more broadly, cam paigns to address inequality and oppression. This has led to a growth of interest in gender issues and the availability of women's studies as a sub ject for academic debate and study. However, what was not always appreciated was the inter-relationship of women's issues and 'men's