Johnnie Hamilton-Mason, PhD, MSW, focuses her research on African American women and families, the intersection of cross-cultural theory and practice, and HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. In addition to her work at Simmons, Hamilton-Mason is the Inaugural Visiting Scholar at Embrace Boston. 

Read our highlights below and find the full conversation here.

For our readers who may not know you or your background, I thought we could start with you telling us a bit about yourself and how you made your way to the Simmons School of Social Work?

I think I would say that I’ve always had a public health kind of lens on social work, [so I’ll talk you through things with that in mind]. Before I pursued my MSW, I was the Medical Follow-Up Coordinator for the city of Boston in the Lead Poisoning Prevention Center. That really framed some of my thinking and the way that I see things, because I was responsible for making sure that every child in the city of Boston with an elevated lead poisoning level came into the Lead Poisoning Center and got treatment at Boston City Hospital’s pediatric unit. Having that as my first job as a new undergraduate really gave me a larger systems perspective.

Are there ways in which the overlap between social work and public health has changed or evolved over the course of your career?

It has not always been stressed [in social work] that we look at the root causes of some of the challenges that people face. Or that we look at the environment or neighborhoods that people live in. The MSW course that does that, it’s possible that people might forget about it, [because it’s early in the program and a lot comes after it]. Some of our work is to make sure that we’re not privileging one lens over another and that we understand how that larger picture really frames the individual in a way that has little to do with biology, but other factors like poverty or living in urban environments. 

For MSW students who [pursue the Simmons MSW with Public Health Certificate}, what kind of doors do you feel like it might open for them?

There are lots of career choices that people could make. When it comes to, say, addiction or substance use treatment, these areas are very closely connected to public health. Opioid epidemic work is public health work. HIV/AIDS work is connected to public health. There’s the potential for those with the public health certificate to simply just be able to look at more jobs and to find exciting work that’s focused on helping individuals but also helping communities that end up being in the public health arena.

Sometimes as social workers we can tend to hear things that sound like global problems that stem from our culture of capitalism. Do you have any advice on tackling that with clients?

I tend to think that a lot of that can be done in the narrative approach. Narrative approach is about doing problem posing; is the problem in you or is it out in the world and impacting you? Is it something you have internalized? Helping people to understand it and how they fit into it. ... Helping clients to see that they’re not the only one is important. That it’s not just because they lost their job or whatever the circumstances are. The systemic view can help to change mindsets. Someone might feel self-critical about developing diabetes but if you take a look at what options they had to eat at their disposal, you can see how [it’s not all about the individual’s choices]. There is a lot out there that people can internalize and not realize that they’ve internalized something as being about them when in fact there can be thousands of people dealing with the exact same thing. Discussing these things can help eliminate self-blaming tendencies.