Social Worker

>> My name is Marty Finkelstein and I'm a social worker. I work for South Beach Psychiatric Center where I work with adults age 18 to 80 something with mental health issue. Well, I do therapy with a case load of, I think, 45 right now. I'm also responsible for our clinic's group program. So, all the different -- we have an art therapy, music therapy, and a bunch of other fun group stuff going on. And I'm also going to be transitioning to work more in employment services to get people working so that they can get out of poverty and mental illness. A lot of the people that I work with are actually just poor and the mental illness is secondary to that. So, it's like, "Oh, of course you're anxious because you don't know if you're going to be able to eat or pay rent or any of those things." And so a lot of people are living on supplemental security income, SSI, which is about 800 a month now. And in New York that doesn't go very far. So, poverty is like really the big thing and I see a lot of depression, anxiety, and then there are also people who do have schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, et cetera. I'll usually see probably six people in a day for individual stuff and then, if I'm doing a group, there'll be like five more. One of the things I'm really excited about doing is starting a worker cooperative as a business venture. And we have five people now that we're working with and we make all natural body butter.