ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that current working professionals are obliged to rethink their model and their practices, shift from "mental disease thinking" to "problems in living thinking", and become more humane in practice. An important shift is getting clear on the difference between a "difficult person" and a "mentally diseased person". A humane helper does not start from the place that "human beings are born to be happy and any deviation from 'happy' is abnormal and a mental disorder". But the primary shift, however, and the one that takes all other shifts into account is the basic shift in paradigm: shifting to the paradigm of humane helping. The phrase "paradigm shift" is used rather frequently and loosely to provide added luster to a speaker's preferred way of thinking. It is the radical shift from looking for assorted leaks in the plumbing to acknowledging that life is difficult.
