Topic summary
Social worker
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Social work.
United States
During the 1840s, Dorothea Lynde Dix, a retired Boston teacher who is considered the founder of the Mental Health Movement, began a crusade that would change the way people with mental disorders were viewed and treated. Dix was not a social worker; the profession was not established until after she died in 1887. However, her life and work were embraced by early psychiatric social workers (mental health social worker/clinical social worker), and she is considered one of the pioneers of psychiatric social work along with Elizabeth Horton, who in 1907 was the first social worker to work in a psychiatric setting as an aftercare agent in the New York hospital systems to provide post-discharge supportive services.