Restructuring help: A human services paradigm for the 1990s

Abstract

Conclusion The new paradigm calls for the restructuring, redistribution, and expansion of helping behavior by those who ordinarily function as consumers of help. Consumers are to become producers of prosumers. By so doing they expand the help‐giving resources quantitatively by converting helpees into helpers. The help is also changed qualitatively because the peers and the self‐helpers possess an indigenous or inside understanding of the problems and the people to whom they offer help. Heins Kohut, the brilliant psychoanalyst, suggests that the key to therapeutic change may not be insight or understanding, but rather being understood. Who better to understand than those who have been there?