One of the most challenging of all fields of social work is psychiatric social work. This involves helping people who are suffering from mental illness to deal with their condition so that they can be re-integrated into society. Entering this field normally requires more training than other area of social work.
The main goal of social workers in psychiatry is to help people who are suffering from mental illness to be able to function in the outside world. The days when we simply locked up the mentally ill are long gone which means that we have to help people to fit into regular society. This is the sort of thing that a psychiatric social worker will do. They will help people who are suffering from mental illness to develop coping mechanisms and to develop the required social skills so that they can be assimilated to society at large.
Psychiatric social workers don't just work with the mentally ill, they also offer counselling to people who are having problems with things like addictions, depression or even stress. This counselling will often focus on helping people to find the root cause of their issues and coming up with coping mechanisms to minimize the impact. The goal is to help improve the quality of peoples lives and to help them to become useful and productive members of society. In a lot of cases this kind of counselling will be ordered by the courts for people who's problems have led them into criminal activity.
Social workers in psychiatry can be found in a wide variety of different environments. The most obvious places that you would encounter them would be in hospitals. You will also find them working in places like prisons, schools and even in private practice. A social worker will differ from a psychiatrist in that they are more concerned with treating the whole person and helping them to deal with the impact that their illness has had on their lives. The psychiatrist on the other hand will be focused more on actually treating the illness.
In order to become a psychiatric social worker you are almost certainly going to have to have a masters degree in social work. In many cases it may be necessary to have a doctorate. Each state will have different licensing requirements so you will want to check with the state that you want to work in to make sure that you meet those requirements. In general the requirements for a psychiatric social worker are more stringent than those for social workers in other fields. This is mainly because of the requirement to work with people who are mentally ill. In many cases it may be possible to meet the education requirements for licensing by taking an online degree. However you do want to be careful and check and make sure that the degree program that you have chosen is acceptable to your states licensing board.