Should social workers be engaged in these practices?

We recognize that there are social workers who conduct critically important work every day. It is also apparent that the boundaries of social work as a profession are unclear (Hill, Fogel, Donaldson, & Erickson, 2017). We also know that there is a smaller subset of social workers, degreed and often licensed professionals, who engage in practices that may fall beyond those fuzzy borders. These workers’ practices would not receive universal acclaim and, in some instances, might appear highly questionable. That said, some of these practices seem to have proponents among social work scholars (e.g., Benn, Gioia, & Seabury, 2009; Raheim & Lu, 2014). The question we focus on here is that Should social workers be engaged in these practices? A useful historical marker is the work of Specht and Courtney (1994) who provided a comprehensive examination of mission drift in the field. In the first chapter of their volume they asserted that “[w]e believe that social work has abandoned its mission to help the poor and oppressed and to build community” (Specht & Courtney, 1994, p. 4; cf., Chernus, 1995). They conclude with a “proposal for a community-based system of social care” which sounds similar to the recent Community Led Support approach undertaken in the UK (Bown, Carrier, & Jennings, 2017, p. 152). Our goal here is to provide some evidence to inform reconsideration of Specht and Courtney’s work as well as subsequent contributions. Over the past 15 years, we have gathered examples of “ideas” and “activities” associated with social workers as examples of possible deviations from the mission of social work (for a masters level program evaluation course in social work). Pignotti and Thyer explored multiple facets of these phenomena in a very systematic fashion (e.g., Pignotti & Thyer, 2009a, 2009b, 2012, 2015; Thyer & Pignotti, 2010, 2015, 2016). Just as Specht and Courtney, as well as Pignotti and Thyer likely concluded, it would be difficult if not impossible to arrive at an estimate regarding the prevalence of these ideas and activities across the entire profession. We would agree with such a conclusion. We will present data that are not only informed by the aforementioned authors but also that offer a slightly different view of these phenomena by focusing on ideas and activities that appear to go beyond the fuzzy boundaries of typical practice. A recent set of Internet searches (July–September 2017) confirmed some elements of our prior list of examples and added many new listings (see Table 1). How were these searches conducted? Because we were looking for practitioner web sites and there is no specialized database for that purpose, we employed a series of Google searches using search strings like (MSW OR CSW OR ACSW OR RSW OR LCSW OR LICSW OR LMSW) AND (some term like healing or angels). In addition, we used content that we discovered in some of those results as one might when doing snowball sampling or reference harvesting in systematic reviews. In addition, we scanned a few conference web sites (e.g., https://www.ep-conference.org/learn