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Maricarmen Alvarado I Am Sam

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Maricarmen Alvarado I Am Sam
Maricarmen Alvarado
Social Work 20
Estella Saldivar
04-14-2015
I Am Sam In the movie “I am Sam” there is this man who has mental issues. Sam has a mental age of a 7-year-old child; he has a daughter whose mother abandoned him and her after she [Lucy, Sam’s daughter] was born. Throughout the movie the audience is able to see how Lucy is noticing her dad’s capacity of doing things, she begins to notice that her dad is different from others. Even though Sam is a caring dad, Lucy at her young age is smarter than her dad. One time they went to Big Boy [a restaurant], Sam causes disturbance when he cannot gets the pancakes he is used to get in IHOP. Lucy is puzzled by all of his reactions to things and her friends start to call her dad “retarded.” She is embarrassed of what is happening so she tells her friends that she is adopted so that they do not make fun of her dad. At one of her birthday parties a social worker surprisingly appears and takes Lucy away from Sam. This is because, they think that he is not a good example for Lucy, but they let him see her during the week. After all Sam gets to a court trial fighting for Lucy’s custody, but the court decides to give Lucy to another family that will take care of her. At the end Sam wins the custody but he know he cannot give Lucy a proper way of educating her, so he let other parents take care of her with the condition of letting him see his daughter continuously. As a social worker, a lot of services can be provided, for instance those who have a mental issue could go to community mental health programs or we could give our client the service of how to properly educate children. A mental issue is when a person cannot take care of his/herself, in most cases professionals work with them and provide them appropriate care and treatment. In this case, Sam had a mental issue because he had trouble talking, he did not have the ability to connect actions with the consequences, and other things that classified him as a person
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