The Human Experience Specialist The Next Evolution in Helping

The Human Experience Specialist: The Next Evolution in Helping

Dr. Eric Maisel (USA)

In a book appearing from Ethics International Press called The Human Experience Specialist, I propose a new helper called the human experience specialist.

This helper does not currently exist, at least not formally. Who knows how many coaches, psychotherapists, marriage counsellors, chaplains, and social workers are already working this way? But as to there being a formal category, the human experience specialist does not exist yet.

And HES’s are needed.

Right now, our helping models, to include psychiatry, psychotherapy, mental health counselling, and life coaching, are insufficient. Often, when they turn very human reactions to stress or despair into medical conditions, they are wrong-headed. Sometimes they latch onto a single idea—like goal-setting for coaches or cognitive improvement for cognitive therapists—and lose the person. There are practitioners out there who do good work, but their models are flawed. Something new and different is needed.

What’s needed is not another diagnostic scheme, theoretical orientation, labeling system, chemical fix, tactic, strategy, or technical intervention. What is needed is a new sort of helper, one whose area of expertise is human nature and whose stock-in-trade is wisdom.

The professional groups currently empowered to help people in distress—psychologists, psychiatrists, clinical social workers, family therapists, mental health counsellors, mental health coaches, etc.—are limited in scope and too often tied at the hip to the pseudo-medical “mental disorder” model. This leaves a huge gap that needs filling.

It can only be filled by new practitioners who take as their canvas all of life. In The Human Experience Specialist, I describe these new helpers and paint a picture of what they might know (and not know), what they might do (and not do), how they might be trained, and how society might react to them. This is a speculative adventure and, if you’re interested, I hope you’ll enjoy the ride.

With our epidemics of depression, anxiety, addiction, loneliness, job dissatisfaction, and existential malaise, we need more than the chemicals of psychiatry, the rah-rah of coaching, and the technical interventions of psychotherapy. We need wise helpers who understand human nature and who can provide what sufferers need. We need human experience specialists.

What does a human experience specialist actually do and what does she refrain from doing? We know what she says: “I’m happy to look at anything that might be relevant.” We know what she tries: anything that might actually help, including importing ideas from around the world. Zen isn’t her lens, sociology isn’t her lens, psychology isn’t her lens, spirituality isn’t her lens: her lens is the human experience, human reality, human nature, and all things human.

To begin with, she understands that the current system produces labels rather than diagnoses and that the very justification for saying that someone has a mental disorder or a mental disease is in hot dispute. She also understands that the wanton use of chemicals, illegitimately called “medication,” is suspect and that she is obliged to take a position on their use, a complicated position, to be sure, since some people may want these chemicals and may indeed be helped by them, even if only by the placebo effect.

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