Strengths based approach in mental illness-need for a measurement scale

Pages: 376-381
Manasi Oza (Department of Psychiatric Social Work, National Institute of Mental Health & Neuro Sciences, Bangalore)

The Strengths Perspective in social work came to the fore in the latter half of the twentieth century and emerged from the work of Dennis Saleebey, Ann Weick, Charles Rapp, Patrick Sullivan, and Walter Kisthardt at the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare. In the following years, the strengths approach to case management has been used as an intervention for people diagnosed with different disorders and with various populations. While literature shows that the approach is successful, it also notes that an assessment of strengths is a pre-requisite for strengths based interventions. Scales to measure strengths have been developed and yet the strengths based approach is not as widely used as it could be. This paper reviews the existing quantitative strengths based scales and elucidates the need for a new standardized strengths based scale.