The Great Self-Help Scam?

An interesting post on PsyBlog asks whether Self-Help books, particularly in the States, are just one great money making scam. It is certainly a huge industry: there seems to be an endless demand for popular books aimed at a mass market, which claim to hold the secret of happiness, wealth and good relationships, and many of them read like simplistic psychobabble.

While arguments rage as to whether such books can really do what they say on the tin, or if they are singlehandedly responsible for the increasing divorce rates, drug abuse and “the end of romance” (Steve Salerno, author of Sham, How the Self Help Movement Made America Helpless), I would argue that the main role of the less challenging self-help and/or self-improvement books is to create the comforting illusion that the reader is doing something proactive towards change, not only by reading but just by buying the book.

This says more about the culture of consumerism than it does about self-help books as such — you could create the same illusion by mass buying cookery books or literary novels, for example. You can sit and look at them on the shelf and feel like someone who knows their stuff in the kitchen, or a sensitive intellectual type. They reinforce your own aspirations and your self concept. There is also something about the actual act of purchase which becomes easily confused with an inner process of acquisition and change.

This is of course a basic principle of marketing: buy this dress, buy another version of yourself. It is going one step further, though, to believe that buying a text about something buys us access to the thing itself — richness, thinness, happiness. This is not necessarily buying hope of change, or a vision. It can be buying the feeling that there is a secret that can be possessed, and once it is revealed you do not need to work for the results you want. It is also implied that you can attain these results by yourself. Even when the book is about communication, I imagine that quite often one person in a given relationship is an avid reader (dare I say usually a woman?) while the other runs a mile at the sight of the book.

Of course there is a certain amount of wisdom in the books, sometimes a considerable amount. Accessible sources of information that are available to all have to be a good thing. And everyone uses the books in a different way; sometimes these are empowering ways. Nonetheless I do wonder when I see a row of titles on a shelf why one book, if it contains the secret to happiness, is not enough?

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