The Paraphrasing of Personal Development

Self-help books are usually defined as a genre of literature that provides advice, strategies, and techniques to help individuals improve aspects of their personal lives. These books typically focus on topics like mental health, personal growth, productivity, relationships, career development, and overall well-being. According to trends in literature, personal development books (a subset of the self-help genre) have seen a resurgence, making up a large portion of books being bought in the 2010s onwards (Nielsen Book, 2023).

The books within this genre typically promote the idea that with the right mindset and tools, individuals can change or improve aspects of their lives. Whether this is true or not is up for extreme levels of debate and has been in recent years where we have seen: a publishing trend of self-help literature and podcasts, but a decline in living standards and mental health almost at the same time. In the article Why Are Self-Help Books Not So Helpful At All?, the author argues that the 'one size fits all' approach that is offered in self-help books ad nauseam can be frustrating to readers who do not see themselves as fitting into the mould (Psychology Today, 2020). Therefore, when failure strikes, this could actually be harmful when it comes to their mental wellbeing.

The question of who self-help books are aimed at has been a long debate as well with many more recent studies shown that they have been aimed at men. In her article, Suzanne Moore discusses how these books have hyper-focused themselves on improving the emotional wellbeing of men in our modern and more detached world whilst also perhaps oversimplifying the issues within (Moore, 2019). However, according to Goodreads, while three-quarters of overall readers are women, 62.5% of self-help books readers are also women. This not only makes for a weird overlaps in the market, but shows us too that there is large amount of people reading self-help books.

Which obviously brings us on to whether they actually work. The question of whether they work has divided the stratosphere for mental health, looking at the 'problem focused' and 'growth focused' subsets differently and acknowledging that the latter perhaps does not have the same positive impact as the first. (Bergsma, 2008). 'Problem focused' books are the ones that rely on one sole issue, usually concerning mental health whilst 'growth focused' books are those about personal development and the idea of perpetually 'growing as a person'. The latter metaphorically the literary equivalent of the 'before and after' photos of people on diets.

But there is an even bigger question about the self-help industry as a whole which is perhaps the focus of this entire article and it concerns how the self-help industry, including its literature has shaped the way we as people understand growth, development, mental health and success. In his book Oracle at the Supermarket, Steven Sarker argues that this is the actual route taken and not the other way around. We have not sought out the self-help literature instead, it has sought us out and shaped our perception of what it means to be better than ourselves. This is reflective, Sarker argues, of our deeper cultural fear of personal failure. (Sarker, 2004). This is where we get a commodification of personal growth stepping into the argument and how, an over-simplification of complex life problems has possibly led us down the rabbit hole to the issue of self-diagnosis of mental health issues which we see today.

In this article I will address the following issues:

1. the complex problems usually dealt with by self-help books
2. the way in which self-help preys on cultural fears of personal failure
3. how self-help has perhaps helped lead our society down a mental health self-diagnosis rabbit hole

Pop-Problems: How the Self-Help Industry is Part of a Self-Fulfilling Cycle

From the years 2013 to 2019, it was seen that in the USA, the self-help genre tripled in its output and sales of books and as of 2020 - the genre became worth almost $11 billion (Anderson, 2020). And, in the same statistics, it is thought that the most common themes of the best-selling self-help books happen to be those dealing with anxiety and depression through the lens of recovery and confidence.

In her article Is Self-Care Just a Trend? Shainna Ali argues that there is a clear line between what once was constituted as self-care before 2018 and what is now constituted as self-care. In this she states that there is much more of a focus and a want to read books related to mental health than physical fitness or dieting, which were perhaps the older methods of personal development and improvement. Whilst she recognises the surge in people being "hungry for knowledge" she also acknowledges that it could be a topic that is, in fact, more complex than the pop-sociology book tends to offer.

So the question here is simply: what happened?

Well, if we are to believe a theory called the 'prevalence inflation hypothesis' (Andrews and Foulkes, 2023) we can clearly see that self-help books have contributed to the awareness we have today about mental health problems such as depression, anxiety and OCD - the three that seem to have been on the increase for the past twenty years or so as they go hand-in-hand with the rise in these topics appearing in self-help literature and culture. Even though this has great advantages to those suffering from complex mental health problems, the theory suggests that it could also be contributing to the problem itself. Whilst the article by Andrews and Foulkes suggests that the awareness in mental health has come to mean that the diagnosis of symptoms has become more refined and accurate, they also state this:

"awareness efforts are leading some individuals to interpret and report milder forms of distress as mental health problems..."

(Andrews and Foulkes, 2023)

With part of the 'awareness efforts' being linked to the rise in self-help literature concerning the improvement of mental health, it is no wonder as to why they are making so much money from the perhaps more mildly suffering public. By pushing the lexicon relating to common mental health problems into the atmosphere, these books have caused a more mental health focused public to use the language of more extreme versions of these problems to report their own symptoms. Thus, making it inadvertently 'trendy' to have these perhaps more complex mental health problems.

This, coupled with the fact that those who write self-help books do not in fact, have to be mental health professionals (mentalhealth.com, 2024) means that often advice becomes distorted or suiting to a point of view that is perhaps, either more serious or more specific than the reader's whilst also convincing them that they can solve this problem that may or may not be their own. Thus, this proves the prevalence inflation hypothesis and also shows how the self-help industry could actually be doing more harm than good in the department of more subtle, less rigid mental health problems.

The Problem as Commodity: The Toxic Cycle of Self-Help

I would like to direct you back to the two different types of self-help book as we are about to cover the problems with the latter: the 'growth focused' books. "Growth focused" self-help books are perhaps the ones with more buzzwords in their lexicon such as: 'mindset' and 'empowerment', not to mention 'resilience', 'manifestation' and 'inner child'. In his article Self Help Books Can Just F- Off, Ian Whitworth describes the self-help industry as producing "sad, predictable ideas" (Whitworth, 2019) only strengthening the cookie-cutter ideas alongside the repetitive lexicon that places them firmly in the genre.

But, as we have already established this is the case, we need to be questioning how this could be more harmful than helpful to the readers who are continuously looking for the answers to life within them. For example, an article in Forbes (Travers, 2022) referenced a study about cortisol levels in the readers of self-help books, showing that they were much higher than those who did not engage in the same genre of books (Raymond, 2016). It again refers to the 'one size fits all approach' which in turn, creates a feeling of failure in those who cannot abide by the author's own rules and methods for success. On the other hand, we have those who in abiding by the rules and methods, still do not feel the state of success they were hoping for - or advertised.

Another article by the British Psychology Society has analysed that the focus on failure and causes of negative moods can often enhance them (Jarrett, 2010) and therefore, the books that tell these stories of failure and cognitive inability are often not best for solving the core of the problem - possibly doing more harm than good and thus, sending the person reading them into a cycle of "addiction" (Travers, 2022) and "rumination" (Jarrett, 2010).

This shows something present in many articles and studies regarding how self-help books actually work. In order to sell, they need not really fix anything but instead, create an awareness and fixation in the reader that something needs to be fixed. The commodification of this therefore becomes selling them the 'cure' whilst also creating new problems and, as Emily Goddard says in her Guardian article "(makes) happiness conditional" (Goddard, 2024). A condition it seems, reliant mostly on the next fix of self-help book.

This also refers to the cultural shift in which the 'growth' self-help book has perpetuated in the repetition of positive affirmations to oneself. Many psychological studies of the modern day have not only referred to this as not a helpful practice but they have stated it is actively harmful. (Nursing Times, 2009) The commodification of this quick-fix could only be for one reason: ease. Get people to do something that is easy to do and do not let them know it is actively harmful and then, sell them the cure to this newly created problem they have no idea is linked to the last thing they were told to do.

The way in which self-help books commodify this problem they themselves have created is probably best presented by an article entitled Why You Should Stop Reading Self-Help Books (2017) as they fall into:

The kind of (books) that tell(s) you you’ve got a problem and the only way to solve this problem is by buying this very book.

(Baze, 2017)

The Modern Mental Health Rabbit Hole: Born Out of the Darkness of the Self-Help Industry

Steve Salerno (2005) called the self-help industry:

‘(An) enterprise wherein people holding the thinnest of credentials diagnose in basically normal people symptoms of inflated or invented maladies, so that they may then implement remedies that have never been shown to work..."

This obviously has some ties into what we looked at before in terms of the toxic cycles produced by reading self-help for any reason. But what does all of this mean for the modern perspective of mental health and what happens to these people who get trapped in the mental health 'rabbit hole' of quick fixes? One of the key concerns I'm going to look at is self-administration - known in our modern times more commonly as 'self-diagnosis'.

Self diagnosis is the act of asserting that there is a mental health condition without the assistance of a mental health professional. It has been shown that anecdotal experiences are perhaps the most perviasive way in which these self-diagnoses are shared and manipulated when it comes to social media (Jaramillo, 2023). But if we scale back a bit, self-help books do the exact same thing. Where social media began with a glamorisation of mental health problems, self-help began with a justification as is: 'you are the way you are because you have (insert mental health problem here)'. And thus, through a number of carefully worded anecdotes that may or may not be true, the writer slowly convinces the reader of how alike they are, a small-scale form of 'mass hysteria'.

Therefore, the self-administration of these other self-help books to treat the same problem coincides with the same issue we are facing today where millions of social media users are consuming and creating content that fuels a support for self-diagnosed mental health problems where nuance is ignored and anecdotes (whether true or not) are focused on how alike they are. This is a larger form of mass hysteria which really put emphasis on the word 'mass'.

Therefore, we can see clear links between what has formed out of the social media hysteria of mental health problems and those born out of the self-help industry in that they focus on the requirement for people being alike, ignoring the nuance of the difficulty being spoken about and often, offering quick and sometimes harmful 'fixes' that perhaps do not even work. Again, if we are to look back in this article, we can tell that these are (like on social media) coming from the mouths of those with the least credentials most of the time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, self-help books, while promising solutions to complex personal issues, often oversimplify challenges, preying on cultural fears of failure. These books may inadvertently contribute to a rise in mental health self-diagnosis, encouraging individuals to label ordinary distress as psychological disorders. Its impact on mental health awareness and self-diagnosis underscores the need for more individualised, professional approach to personal well-being. It has in fact, started a ball rolling on a problem that is now out of our control through its commodification of mental health and personal growth which focuses more on buzzwords than it does on solutions.

Works Cited:

• Ali, S. (2019) ‘Is self-care just a trend?’, Psychology Today
• Anderson, P. (2020) ‘NPD: ‘A Decade of Personal Exploration’ Ahead in US Self-Help Books’, Publishing Perspectives.
• Baze, T. (2017) ‘Why you should stop reading self-help books’, Thought Catalog
• Bergsma, A. (2008). Do Self-Help Books Help? The Journal of Happiness Studies. Volume 9, pp. 341–360.
• Foulkes, L. and Andrews, J.L. (2023) ‘Are mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems? A call to test the prevalence inflation hypothesis’, New Ideas in Psychology.
• Goddard, E. (2024) ‘Self-help: the toxic world of books, courses, and apps’, The Guardian
• Jaramillo, J.A. (2023) 'Down the rabbit hole of self-diagnosis in mental health', University of Colorado Denver
• Jarrett, C. (2010) ‘CBT-based self-help books can do more harm than good’, BPS Research Digest
• MentalHealth.com (2024) 'Are Self-Help Books Helpful?'
• Moore, S. (2019). Self-help books for men: the new solution to anxiety and depression? The Guardian.
• Nielsen Book, (2023). ‘New year, new me’: the consumers driving the self-help boom.
• Nursing Times (2009) ‘Can self-help books be bad for you?’
• Psychology Today, (2020). Why are self-help books not so helpful after all? Psychology Today.
• Raymond, C. (et al) 2016. Salivary cortisol levels and depressive symptomatology in consumers and non-consumers of self-help books: A pilot study. Neural Plasticity, 2016
• Salerno, S. (2005) The Self-Help Myth: How the Self-Improvement Industry Is Making Us Worse, 1st ed. New York: St. Martin's Press
• Starker, S. (2004). Oracle at the Supermarket: The American Preoccupation with Self-Help. 1st ed. New York: Viking Press.
• Travers, M. (2022) ‘A psychologist tells you why you need to escape the toxic world of self-help’, Forbes
• Whitworth, I. (2019) ‘Self-help books that can just f*** off’ ianwhitworth.net