What is Self-Help?
The term self-help can refer to any case whereby an individual or a group, such as a support group, betters themselves economically, intellectually or emotionally. The connotations of the phrase often apply particularly to education, business, psychological or psychotherapeutic nostrums, purveyed through the popular genre of the "self-help" books and self-help personal development movements.
Before a social movement in any cultural group develops enough size, tradition, expertise and social recognition, it undergoes the self help phase of group development. When any social group reaches a certain size (about 80 members), the pattern with human adults seems to be that it will develop a self help "faction" that may eventually bud off (or break away) from the parent group. Often competing larger groups may try to dismiss or otherwise minimize the break away group by describing it as "self help" since its expertise is not supposedly so significant nor true as the older group.
The diverse areas in which self-help concepts are applied are bound together by an expansion of technologies that empower individuals to conduct both trivial and profound activities. 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. Likewise, self-help legal services grew around expanded access to document production technology.
The Internet, and the ever-expanding selection of commercial and information services it offers, is an example of 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)
There is growing evidence that psychological therapies for anxiety, depression, and other common mental health problems can be delivered effectively through books, computer programs, and other media.
Research has shown that people often do solve problems on their own, in many cases using techniques that are similar to those used by psychotherapists. See chapters 4 and 8 in:
The first "self-help" book was - indeed - titled "Self-Help". It was written by Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) and was published in 1859. Its opening sentence is: "Heaven helps those who help themselves", a variation of "God helps them that help themselves", the oft-quoted maxim that appears in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac (1733-1758).
Mark A. Hubble, Barry L. Duncan, Scott D. Miller (Eds), wrote The Heart and Soul of Change: What Works in Therapy, American Psychological Association (1999).
A counter-argument is that some readers of self-help books are seeking "easy answers", but that doesn't mean the answers in the books are easy to apply. A book can suggest a course of action (easy or not), but only the reader can carry it out, and some readers are more willing to do so than others. Those who make the effort often do make improvements in their lives.
Material compiled From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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