Text 1: Self-help books could ruin your life! They promise everything - and sell in their millions, but a leading psychologist remains unconvinced
Visit the self-help section on Amazon or browse the shelves of your local bookshop and you will find hundreds of books that promise to improve your life in any number of ways. You can read, among other things, about the secrets to daily joy and lasting fulfilment, how to find career success, five simple steps to emotional healing, and how to stop worry and anxiety from ruining your relationships.
Little wonder, then, that these books sell in huge numbers — and sell fast, particularly during an economic downturn. While UK book sales were down recently by 1per cent overall, sales of self-help books for the same period soared by 25 per cent. In Britain, it’s estimated that the cult of self-help has earned publishers some £60 million in the past five years. In the U.S., theself-help market is worth more than $10 billion (£6 billion) a year.
Yet the very fact that there are so many self-help books on the market is likely to be a sign that none of them is particularly effective. After all, if one of them really did unlock the secret to everlasting happiness, wouldn’t itcorner the market and crowd out all the others?
Instead, there is what is known in the self-help industry as the ‘18-month rule’ — which is that the person most likely to buy a book this week is someone who bought one 18 months earlier.
In his book Sham: How The Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, author Steve Salerno argues that there are huge costs associated with the public acceptance of the self-help movement.
Buying into the overblown claims such books make, he argues, can lead to you blaming yourself for failure when you don’t achieve the outcome you hoped for — and avoiding treatments that actually work. I tend to agree.
Furthermore, very little of the advice offered in self-help books has been tested scientifically, despite the fact that there are ways to do so. Indeed, there have been many good scientific studies on how to become happier.
Timothy D. Wilson, Daily mail Online, August 15th, 2011