Dirty Work Designations: Their Features and Consequences in a Psychiatric Setting

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Abstract
This paper explores the origin and consequences of a community mental health team's designation of some of its encounters with clients as “shit work.” First, the paper considers the perspective through which team members reviewed and characterized their performance. “Shit work” characterizations emerged when team members felt not only unable to do something for clients in a therapeutic sense, but compelled to do something to them in a coercive sense (in particular, to order involuntary hospitalization). Second, it is suggested that not only are dirty work designations the product of reviewing work performance through a particular perspective, but they also function publicly to reaffirm performance criteria, to express moral distance from a particular performance, and to tutor an observer into the preferred interpretation of a particular transaction.

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