RECOVERY ASSISTANT – A NEW HELPING PROFESSION IN THE FIELD OF MENTAL HEALTH

<ns3:p>The article analyses the profession of a humanitarian worker as a representative of the broader category of helping professions. Given the growing global demand for humanitarian aid, the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, as well as the inflow of migrants and refugees from Africa and Asia to Europe through various corridors, the issue of providing humanitarian aid is becoming more and more important. Despite this, the profession is not on the official list of professions in Poland, and the degree of its recognition and professionalization in the sociological sense remains low. Although there are already specialised post-graduate courses in humanitarian and development aid in Poland, it seems that general knowledge about the specificity of this profession, the methods it uses as well as the dilemmas associated with it is still poor. The article also discusses the relationship of humanitarian aid to social work and the humanitarian worker to other aid professions. It also tries to answer the question whether humanitarian aid is community work and discusses various critical threads that appear in the literature in relation to humanitarian aid.</ns3:p>