Latest posts
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Kayla Bonkowski | The Difference Between a Therapist and a Social Worker
Both professions involve extended conversations with people who are struggling. The training, scope, and underlying framework are different enough that treating the terms as interchangeable leads to real confusion about what each can offer. Kayla Bonkowski, a social work graduate student in Sterling Heights, Michigan, thinks the distinction deserves a plain explanation. A therapist —…
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Kayla Bonkowski | What Social Workers Actually Do in Medical Settings
Medical social workers operate in hospital rooms, discharge planning meetings, and family conferences. Most patients meet one at a moment of crisis, which is not the ideal introduction to what the role covers. Kayla Bonkowski, a social work graduate student in Sterling Heights, Michigan, has spent time inside these systems through her academic training and…
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Kayla Bonkowski | What Happens to a Family When Someone Is Dying
Terminal illness does not only affect the patient. It reorganizes the entire family system — and the social worker steps into that reorganization. Terminal illness does not arrive cleanly. It arrives into a household that already has its own structure, its own history, and its own long-standing patterns for how the people inside it relate…
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Kayla Bonkowski | When Fitness Becomes a Mental Health Practice
The research on exercise and mental health is more specific than the general claim suggests. The specifics make it more useful. The claim that exercise is good for mental health is repeated often enough to have become background noise. It is also true, and the research behind it is more specific and more useful than…
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Kayla Bonkowski | What Palliative Care Is — and Why It Is Not the Same as Hospice
The two terms are used interchangeably. They refer to different things. The difference determines what a patient can access and when. Hospice and palliative care are not the same thing. They are used interchangeably in most conversations about serious illness. That confusion is not trivial. It determines what patients access, when they access it, and…
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Kayla Bonkowski | The Case for Combining Psychology and Social Work
The two fields approach human experience from different directions. The overlap between them is where the strongest clinical work happens. Psychology and social work are not substitutes for each other. They cover adjacent territory from different angles. A psychology background without social work training produces clinical understanding with limited tools for real-world intervention. A social…
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Kayla Bonkowski | What Foster Dogs Need That a Shelter Cannot Give Them
Shelters save animals. What happens in a foster home is something different, and the difference matters for every animal that passes through one. Shelters save lives. They provide physical safety, veterinary care, and intake processing for animals who would otherwise have no protection. Without them, the animal welfare situation in most American cities would be…
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Kayla Bonkowski | Why CrossFit Is Not a Weight Loss Program
People use it to lose weight. That is not what it is designed to do. The distinction explains why it works when other approaches don’t. CrossFit is a strength and conditioning methodology. The workouts are measurable, scalable, and scored. Progress is tracked against previous results. The stated goal is to improve performance across a broad…
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Kayla Bonkowski | The Grief Nobody Prepares a Family For
There are two grief periods in a terminal illness. Most families only know about one of them. The grief that comes after a death is the one people expect. The condolence calls, the casseroles, the cards. Society has rituals for it. What happens before the death is less acknowledged and, for many families, significantly harder…
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Kayla Bonkowski | What Hospice Social Workers Actually Do All Day
The role is one of the least understood in end-of-life care. Most families can describe what the hospice nurse does. The social worker is harder to explain. Most families cannot describe what a hospice social worker does. They can describe the nurse. They can describe the physician who signed the hospice order. The social worker…