Self-help

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For the sense of a legal doctrine, see Self-help (law).

The term self-help can refer to any case or practice whereby an individual or a group attempts self-guided improvement^[1]—economically, intellectually or emotionally. The basis for self-help is often self-reliance, publicly available information, or support groups where people with similar problems join together.^[1] From early exemplars in self-driven legal practice (Salerno 2005: 23-24) and home-spun advice, the connotations of the phrase have spread and often apply particularly to education, business, psychological or psychotherapeutic nostrums, purveyed through the popular genre of "self-help" books and through self-help personal development movements.

The concept of self-help has also found purchase, however, in more and in wider circles. In merchandising, tendencies toward self-help have in recent years resulted in automated self-check-out payment-systems. Self-help fuel-pumps replaced full-service petroleum pumps in the United States and the UK in the late 20th Century, whilst in Japan self service remains rarer.

There are self help groups for addictions world wide. Self help in health treatment is a viable and affordable alternative for professional services but works best in partnership with professionals as Humphrey concludes. Often judges will order those caught drinking and driving to attend Alcoholics Anonymous. Stanton Peele says this turns voluntary self help to forced treatment.

Any health condition can find a self help method or group such as parents of the mentally ill. But there are limits and these methods do not work for everyone. As well as, experienced long time members sharing experiences with a similar practical problem such as finances of a health problem, these health groups can become lobby groups and educational material clearing houses. Those who help themselves by learning about health problems are helping themselves through self help. But self help in this context is often really peer-to-peer support.

1 Sociological theories of self-help
2 History
3 The self-help marketplace
4 Criticisms
5 Counter-Criticisms
6 See also
7 External links
8 References
9 Further reading
10 Footnotes

Sociological theories of self-help

Those who experience a problem first hand have a certain type of knowledge that might be called folk knowledge [See the Sociology of Knowledge]. This is often not accepted knowledge by doctors or lawyers or other guarded professions. The admission of sociological evidence at the Canadian Supreme Court is an example where knowledge is being taken from a wider array of sources.[case(s) cite?] Likewise self help knowledge, far from the so called expert knowledge of self help books alone, is perhaps best understood as speaking from experience rather than from book knowledge. Thus self help books are full of case studies of real person's stories of dealing with a problem.

An expansion of the technologies that empower individuals to conduct both trivial and profound activities binds together the diverse genres which apply self-help concepts^{[citation needed]}. Self-help book-publishing arose from decentralization of ideology, from a growth of publishing industries using expanded printing technologies and (at the pinnacle of growth) from the spread of new psychological sciences^{[citation needed]}. Likewise, self-help legal services grew around expanded access to document-production technology (viz: the printing industry in the 18th century). The Internet (with the ever-expanding selection of commercial and information services which it offers) exemplifies movement toward self-help on a grand scale. This integration has produced a new cadre of tools, such as books with a unique passcode printed on each copy that enable the reader to take an online test quantifying where their skills stand in the concepts taught by the book. (Bradberry and Greaves, 2005)

History

Legal self-help preceded the emergence of self-help in other areas. For many people from the 18th century onwards, self-help became a way of saving costs in legal situations, with self-help publications available to help with routine legal matters from filing wills to domestic processes to recording property deeds.

Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) published the first self-consciously personal-development "self-help" book — entitled "Self-Help" — in 1859. Its opening sentence: "Heaven helps those who help themselves", provides a variation of "God helps them that help themselves", the oft-quoted maxim that also appeared previously in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac (1733 - 1758). Alcoholics Anonymous was started by two alcoholics, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith who first met on May 12, 1935. The twelve-step program grew from this to become perhaps the world's most popular basis of self-help care.

The self-help marketplace

Research firm Marketdata estimated the "self-improvement" market as worth $8.5 billion in 2003 — including infomercials, mail-order catalogs, holistic institutes, books, audio cassettes, motivational speaker seminars, the personal coaching market, weight-loss and stress-management programs. Marketdata projected that the total market size would grow to over $11 billion by 2008.

Within the context of this larger market, group and corporate attempts to aid the "seeker" have moved into the "self-help" marketplace, with LGATs and psychotherapy systems ready with more or less pre-packaged solutions to instruct folk seeking their own individual betterment.

There is also an exploding market of computer self help books such as the Dummies Guides and the Complete Idiots Guides. This market has remained under studied as a press.

Compare with other motivational groups (some of them sometimes called cults):

Criticisms

Some critics have suggested that self-help books and programs offer "easy answers" to difficult personal problems^{[citation needed]}. According to this view, the reader or participant receives the equivalent of a placebo, while writers and publishers collect their profits.

Christopher Buckley's book God is My Broker (1998) asserts: "The only way to get rich from a self-help book is to write one."

Commentators have also criticised self-help books for containing pseudo-scientific assertions that tend to mislead the consumer^{[citation needed]}.

In her 1993 book I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, Wendy Kaminer criticizes the self-help movement for encouraging people to focus on individual self-improvement (rather than joining collective social movements) to solve their problems.

Steve Salerno (2005) portrays the self-help movement (he uses the acronym "SHAM": the Self-Help and Actualization Movement) not only as ineffective in achieving its goals, but also as socially harmful.

In her 2005 book Self-Help, Inc., sociologist Micki McGee argues that the burgeoning self-improvement industry masks Americans' economic anxieties during a period of economic decline. She sees Americans as "belabored" — at work on themselves, inventing and re-inventing themselves so as to remain employed and employable.

While not critiquing self help per se Stanton Peele certainly looks at the foundations of addictions as diseases which bears on the foundations of Alcoholics Anonymous's disease model of addictions.

In their 2006 book,Secrets of The Superoptimist, authors W.R. Morton & Nathanel Whitten revealed the concept of "SuperOptimism" as a humorous antidote to the overblown self-help book catergory.

In one popular novel and film, the main character and his imaginary friend believe that they must hit "rock bottom":

Self improvement is masturbation, self destruction is the answer. — Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Counter-Criticisms

Growing evidence exists^{[citation needed]} that media (books, computer programs, and others) can effectively deliver psychological therapies for anxiety, depression, and other common mental-health problems seen as having something to do with the need or desire for self-help.

Since most forms of assisted help (therapy, counseling, etc.) are costly, self-help is often the only tool available to the poor and socially disenfranchised. Part of the critique against self-help is thus elitist, focussing on the need for professional guidance rather than on how to help people help themselves. This makes such a critique implicitly political, a resistance to ordinary people learning how to lead their own lives. Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed is an example of self-help in dramatized, political form, in which community members work together to identify their collective problems and find hypothetical solutions. Perhaps the most effective self-help program historically is Alcoholics Anonymous and related twelve-step programs.

Some research has shown that people often do solve problems on their own, in many cases using techniques that resemble those used by psychotherapists (Hubble 1999, chapters 4 and 8) — just as in the days before psychotherapists existed.

Though some readers of self-help books may seek "easy answers", that does not make any answers in the books necessarily easy to apply. A book can suggest a course of action (easy or not), but (according to self-help beliefs) only the reader can carry it out, and some readers may have more willingness or ability to do so than others. Anecdotally, those who make the effort often do make improvements in their lives^{[citation needed]}.

Steven Berglas wrote:

In fairness to [Mark] Monsky and other self-help authors, there is often much useful material in their writings, and much of the damage done by this body of literature is a function of the fact that these books are not read in depth or at all. Many people quote "insights" from the books based upon a cursory reading of the dust jackets and titles. (Steven Berglas 2001)

Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography:

As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my care was employ'd in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct.

While Franklin describes a straightforward and easy-to-understand method, he clearly does not suggest that it is easy to apply. Some self-help authors may gloss over this distinction, but even when they don't, readers may overlook it. Franklin himself admitted that he achieved only partial success, but he thought any improvement preferable to none, and he continued his efforts over several years^{[citation needed]}.

As for the self-improvement versus collective social improvement critique: if each individual improves his or her self, then in the long-term, it should allegedly benefit society as a whole; thus self-improvement provides one possible (indirect) path to collective social change.