This work brings together research on professional discourses from both traditional helping contexts such as doctor-patient interaction or psychotherapy and more recent helping contexts such as executive coaching. Unlike workplace discourse, professional and institutional discourses – by now well established fields in linguistic research – of helping professions represent an innovative concept in its orientation to a common communicative goal: solving patients’ and clients’ physical, psychological, emotional, professional or managerial problems via a particular helping discourse. The book sets out to uncover differences, similarities and interferences in how professionals and those seeking help interactively tackle this communicative goal. In its focus on professional helping contexts and its inter-professional perspective, the current book is a primer, intended to spark off more interdisciplinary and (applied) research on helping discourses, a socio-cultural phenomenon that is of growing importance in our post-modern society.