Carrying on with the theme of Mental Health Awareness Month, and Mental Health Awareness Week which starts today in the UK, today’s post is looking at self-help books. The self-help genre has become a multi-billion dollar industry around the world. In the United States alone, self-help books earn around $2.5 billion a year. So, what is it about self-help books that make them so popular and do they actually work?
Quite often when I talk about self-help books to other people, I am confronted with a more than healthy dose of cynicism, with the words “a load of hogwash” or something of the like quickly following. Seemingly, there are many people who do not see the benefit of self-help books. And yet, the statistics of the money they bring into the book industry suggests otherwise. Indeed, Dale Carnegie’s seminal 1936 book, How To Win Friends and Influence People, has sold 16 million copies world wide, garnering Carnegie the status of “father of the self-help movement” for many people. This independent article lists what they qualify as Four of the Most Influential Self-Help Books of All Time, including Carnegie.
The theme of productivity has continued to find popularity in the self-help genre, with many of the latest releases featuring titles like David Allen’s Getting Things Done, Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Sarah Knight’s Get Your Sh*t Together. It is clear that the self-help movement for a large majority of people is focused on a final outcome of professional development. However, the other side of self-help books are those that deal with mental health and enlightenment.
According to the National Health Services in an article from late 2018, a sixth of the population in England between the ages of 16 and 64 are dealing with a mental health problem, and this number is on the rise. The causes for stress, anxiety, and depression seem to be even more rampant. And the result? People are looking for solutions and maybe, just maybe, those solutions are in self-help and development books.
But the real question is do they work? Many self-help books are filled with solution after solution of what you can do to your life in order to make it different. However, Matt Sandrini, in an article for Medium, insisted that self-help books can become a form of what he terms as “infocrastination”: the state of consuming self-help books for the information but never taking action in the real world to implement what has been learnt. The implication here is that self-help books are yet another form of escapism from one’s problems wrapped in the packaging as a solution.
In many cases, this could be considered accurate. However, this is where knowing what it is you are looking for from self-help books becomes so essential. Where in productivity self-help books, finding advice and solutions can be considered as guidelines into developing healthy habits, it is harder to provide “solutions” for mental health as it is hard to implement them.
Until last year, I had never read a self-help book. I was one of those who viewed them with skepticism and, retrospectively, a fair amount of judgement. However, at the start of 2018 I decided to give one a try. I had found myself in a place of feeling isolated, having left school and in the midsts of a gap year that had no plan. I was not looking for information on how to be more productive, I was searching for an answer as to why I felt so low. I was not under any impression that a self-help book would fully answer that question for me, but I was feeling pretty desperate. And while I was right, the books I was reading did not answer those questions for me, it also did help me to answer those questions myself.
What I came to realise was that while I was holding in and denying so much of my emotional distress, I was similarly making it harder for myself to be introspective. Reading self-help books gave me a peek at the struggles of others, and while they talked about their feelings and responses, I found a space to connect and relate without having to make myself vulnerable around others. And through this process of being able to relate to some of what was written, I was able to work through my own feelings. It did not fix them by any means, but there is empowerment in being able to discern why you are feeling the way that you do that gave me the confidence to make the changes that I needed to feel better.
I used self-help books as I would a therapist. Taking to it my problems and taking away from it only that which helped me to work through my issues myself. I did not ask for a miracle, but a starting point and it is exactly what I got. They may not work for everyone but if approached the right way, self-help books can be a great conduit for introspection.
If you’ve enjoyed this post, here are the other posts we have done for this year’s Mental Health Awareness Month and Week:
5 Best Podcasts to Check Out: Mental Health Awareness Edition
“She Must Be Mad” by Charly Cox Review
~S~
