Heather Schulien and Jim Cosenza

Heather Schulien and Jim Cosenza

The work of the modern day social worker has been muddied through various facets, one of those being television. TV shows usually portray social workers as middle-aged, white women who are taking care of the kids by day and fighting for community justice at night. In reality, the field of social work is vast, encompassing many different skills and values.

Chicago is home to all kinds of social workers, including those who have decided to become Licensed Clinical Social Workers. This specialized field includes social workers that have been trained in psychotherapy, helping individuals deal with a variety of mental health and living problems with hopes of easing the difficulty of their day-to-day functions.

It's similar to a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor with one major difference. Say you're the patient of a LCPC using Medicare to get help. Unless there's a doctor in the building, your LCPC can't practice. A licensed clinical social worker can help you even when that doctor decides to get 18 holes in at the last minute.

Two hometown LCSWs are Heather Schulien and Jim Cosenza, Schulien's main focus with her work is to help families through therapy, but sees children, adolescents and adults on an individual basis as well, while Cosenza works mainly with adults. Both deal with a wide assortment of issues on a daily basis, including depression and unemployment worries. Cosenza sees a lot of depression coming from his transgender clients who are beaten down by cultural pressures.

People who only have a single encounter with a social worker might have an incorrect impression of what it is they do. "Some people see social workers as, kind of, part of the criminal justice system or child welfare system," says Cosenza.

He says that someone in his position has all kinds of responsibilities, from assisting physicians with a patient's discharge from a hospital to helping an entire family through the death of a loved one who has been in hospice care.

To deal with these kinds of situations, LCSWs must be highly educated because the field, as an academic discipline, is very broad. Cosenza says that they take in theories from different kinds of professions, like medicine or psychology, and synthesis their ideas to help impact people's lives.

That impact can only go so far, though. "A lot of people think that I'm just going to fix them," says Schulien.

You need to do a lot of work on your own as well. Say a child is getting therapy, for example. Schulien says that when you work with them, you're actually working with the whole family. But that doesn't damper her outlook on her profession.

"Social work is aimed at making people feel better," says Schulien. "Everybody needs help sometimes."

The many arms of social work extend much further than the judicial system that's portrayed in today's media. Professionals, like Cosenza and Schulien, make it their life's goal to help other people. All they get in return is a standardized idea of what a social worker is. Take time to understand just how broad the field of social work, including LCSWs, really is.