I thought the Frankel reading about poverty and family therapy was interesting. I can affirm from my experiences teaching in many different settings that socioeconomic status is usually the biggest determiner of positive or negative emotional, physical, and mental health in children. The reason I became involved in political work and activism in college was because I was an education student and was seeing that those of us working in lower-income school districts were fighting an uphill battle to get the same outcomes or data as those in wealthier school districts. The reason I switched my career from education to social work was because I could see how it was impossible to fully address academic needs without addressing my students' mental health needs and I continue to do political work because we cannot comprehensively address children's mental health needs without changing bigger systems, like the article says. My only critique of the article is that I think it puts somewhat of an over-responsibility on the family therapist/social worker. I agree that as social workers we should be involved in advocating for higher-level systemic change and we should bring those perspectives into our clinical work. However, when actually doing family therapy I think it's a little unrealistic to find a clinical approach that adequately addresses systematic poverty and capitalism while working with individual families. I do think considering family and community resources is an essential component of treating children, though. But winning the kind of systemic change we need that impacts our clients will need to involve changing our approach to clinical work and will need to involve more than just social workers.
In terms of "Far from the Tree," I think one of the most interesting discourses in the disability justice community is the reclaiming and acceptance of the "disability," similar to how we've been talking about deafness in class. Autistic people specifically have taught me a lot about this through the movement to reframe autism as a positive thing and society as the pathology. I agree that within the rigid confines and expectations of capitalism (and all its forms of oppression), many forms of human diversity become over-pathologized. To me, this is similar to victim-blaming because instead of saying we should change the root of the problem, we're telling people who are marginalized to accept their oppression and change themselves to adapt. First of all, this isn't realistic because no matter how much some people with disabilities try to assimilate or mask, many will still face huge amounts of job discrimination, police brutality, etc. Second, people shouldn't have to change who they are. I appreciated how Marcia Martin in my psychopathology course, framed "disability" is another form of human diversity but not a pathology.