Professionals and Nonprofessionals Beyond the Difference: The Emergence of Mutual Compromise

Abstract

Both professional and nonprofessional worker are, without doubt, important actors in psychosocial rehabilitation system. Being familiar with both professsional and nonprofessional experience and, strange as it may seem, identifying with both, I shall here attempt to analyze and describe, according to my perception, two realities as I have come to confront them within myself. First, I should like to clarify terms professional and nonprofessional. I believe that all practitioners, whether formally trained or not, have potential for professional acts. In my experience neither formally trained institutional or private clinic workers nor community workers have edge on being professional: I have seen many professional acts carried out by what we label nonprofessionals, and vice versa. Therefore, I shall refer to those who work within official health and social service network as professionals, and to community workers as nonprofessionals, these including paraprofessionale, volunteers, and natural helpers who work in community, or what we might call the other network.