Self-help books may have opposite effect

Authors like Allen Carr churn out books on topics ranging from gaining more muscles to giving up smoking. Photo / Supplied

In 2005, Micki McGee, a lecturer in sociology at Fordham University, New York, published Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life.

She highlighted the individualistic nature of most self-improvement literature; in assuring readers that they can achieve anything they set their minds to, the self-help authorities lay the blame for failure at the feet of those who suffer it, irrespective of chance and circumstance.

"It forecloses social context," argues McGee. "The entire construct is based on a fiction that the individual is self-contained. In fact, we exist within an environmental setting."

Taken to extremes, this individualism can be highly dangerous.

When the Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne published The Secret in 2006 it went straight to the top of bestseller lists.

Byrne advocated positive thinking as a means of achieving one's goals, blaming negative thoughts for lack of success.

With individual responsibility thus emphasised, it's not hard for our ameliorative ambition to backfire.

As McGee puts it: "Much of the self-help industry really contributes to the insecurity that it is trying to assuage. There is the idea not only that life could be better, but also that it ought to be better."

The psychological pressure of failing to achieve this is similar to that felt by women barraged by perfect-looking women in fashion magazines and billboards.

"The idea that we are in control of our own lives offers up ideals which are simply unattainable."

- INDEPENDENT