Self-help
Self-help or self-improvement is "a focus on self-guided, in contrast to professionally guided, efforts to cope with life problems" [1]—economically, physically, intellectually, or emotionally—often with a substantial psychological basis.
[1] From early examples in pro se legal practice[2] and home-spun advice, the connotations of the word have spread and often apply particularly to education, business, exercise, psychology, and psychotherapy, as commonly distributed through the popular genre of self-help books.
According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, potential benefits of self-help groups that professionals may not be able to provide include friendship, emotional support, experiential knowledge, identity, meaningful roles, and a sense of belonging.
The hyphenated compound word "self-help" often appeared in the 1800s in a legal context, referring to the doctrine that a party in a dispute has the right to use lawful means on their initiative to remedy a wrong.
[5] Some consider the self-help movement to have been inaugurated by George Combe's Constitution (1828), from the way that it advocated personal responsibility and the possibility of naturally sanctioned self-improvement through education or proper self-control.
These offer more-or-less prepackaged solutions to instruct people seeking their betterment,[11][12] just as "the literature of self-improvement directs the reader to familiar frameworks... what the French fin de siècle social theorist Gabriel Tarde called 'the grooves of borrowed thought'.
[15] Conflicts can and do arise on that interface, however, with some professionals considering that, for example, "the twelve-step approach encourages a kind of contemporary version of 19th-century amateurism or enthusiasm in which self-examination and very general social observations are enough to draw rather large conclusions.
[24][25] This form of self-help can enhance people's ability to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and behavior under social stress, which would lead them to appraise social-anxiety-provoking events in more challenging and less threatening terms.
[28] Gerald Rosen raised concerns that psychologists were promoting untested self-help books with exaggerated claims rather than conducting studies that could advance the effectiveness of these programs to help the public.
[29] Rosen noted the potential benefits of self-help but cautioned that good intentions were not sufficient to assure the efficacy and safety of self-administered instructional programs.
[30] From a sociological perspective, self-help is often criticized for inculcating a model of a self-reliant and precarious worker-citizen who does not rely on state support and contributes to a productive labor-force.
[31] Self-help hence promotes and globalizes a capitalist version of individualism and personal development, producing new anxieties while also enabling people to imagine and simulate (through reading, workshops, training) their desired ideals of personhood.
Walker Percy's odd genre-busting Lost in the Cosmos[34] has been described as "a parody of self-help books, a philosophy textbook, and a collection of short stories, quizzes, diagrams, thought experiments, mathematical formulas, made-up dialogue".
[35] Al Franken's self-help guru persona Stuart Smalley was a ridiculous recurring feature on Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s.
[36] In Margaret Atwood's semi-satiric dystopia Oryx and Crake, university literary studies have declined to the point that the protagonist, Snowman, is instructed to write his thesis on self-help books as literature; more revealing of the authors and of the society that produced them than genuinely helpful.
