A new book explains how self-help gurus have made a killing from convincing us that we're screwed up. Kate Holmquist laps it up
A few years ago, over coffee, John Bradshaw, the millionaire self-help guru who founded the "inner child" movement, which aims to help children from dysfunctional families, confessed to me that although he had beaten alcohol addiction, he had become addicted to sex - and had used his fame to gain access to vulnerable women. That certainly stopped me in my tracks. Bradshaw argued in his defence that addiction, once quelled, waits to re-emerge in other guises. And so we have 12-step programmes for addiction to everything from alcohol and drugs to gambling, food, sex, shopping, work, cleaning and even living with an addict. It's only a matter of time before somebody starts a self-help programme for people addicted to the self-help and actualisation movement - or, in a neat acronym, Sham - a €6.5 billion industry that earns some of its gurus €10 million a year.
Like an addictive drug, self-help and motivational workshops may appear to ease the pain and insecurity of life in the short term, but in the long term their effects prove ethereal and leave us believing that if we could only get the right help next time, we could be happy and successful pretty much all the time.
But "psychotherapy has a chancy success rate even in a one-to-one setting over a period of years", says Archie Brodsky, senior research associate in psychiatry and law at Harvard medical school. "How can you expect to break a lifetime of bad behavioural habits through a couple of banquet-hall seminars or sitting down with a book?"
Steve Salerno, an American investigative journalist, was doing a stint on Men's Health magazine, as editor of its books division, when his eyes were opened. He discovered that the company was recycling material over and over again under different names, having discovered that the same male "losers" would buy the same ineffective book over and over again.
"Failure and stagnation are central to all of Sham. The self-help guru has a compelling interest in not helping people. Put bluntly, he has a potent incentive to play his most loyal customers for suckers," he writes in a new exposé, SHAM: How the Gurus of the Self-help Movement Make Us Helpless.
Salerno says the roots of self-help lies in Alcoholics Anonymous, which tells its members to surrender their will to a higher power. This, he believes, has undermined personal responsibility and self-discipline. In the meantime, two generations of self-help psychologists and pseudopsychologists (it's amazing how easy it is to get a doctorate over the Internet) have convinced us that each and every one of us is screwed up.
It has actually changed the way we think, and many of the book titles have entered everyday discourse without our having the vaguest idea of what they mean: I'm OK, You're OK (translation: blame your parents), Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (you're never going to win that argument over who does the laundry, so stop trying) and Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (we're too busy psychoanalysing ourselves with big stuff).
Some of us have become convinced that we really are women who love too much, women who think too much and even women who do too much. This sort of psychology-lite tends to appeal to people who are capable of believing that everything they ever needed to know they learned at creche (in which case they should check if they're still breathing).
In the US, one of the masters of Sham is Dr Phil McGraw, a burnt-out psychologist who "lost patience" with his patients and turned to the lucrative business of grooming witnesses and jurors for court appearances. Enter Oprah Winfrey, one of the most influential women of the 20th century, according to Time magazine, who was defending herself in a legal battle against beef producers after remarking that mad-cow disease put her off burgers for life. She met Dr Phil through his involvement in her case, the two hit it off and he became her protege, guaranteeing him unimaginable riches.
On television, the overpowering ego that is Dr Phil humiliates willing couples in the guise of marital therapy. Last year he told the devastated parents of an unruly nine-year-old, before an audience of millions: "There are 14 characteristics of a serial killer. Your son has nine. Jeffrey Dahmer had seven."
Surely Dr Phil and his fellow Sham showmen, such as Dr John Gray, a celibate monk whose doctorate came from the Maharishi Yogi's finishing school for New Age gurus, aren't doing any harm. Aren't they just the 21st-century versions of snake-oil salesmen and circus-tent evangelists? There is no shortage of them in Ireland, needless to say. We are just as susceptible to paying New Age healers and flanks of unregulated counsellors to cure all ills.
Salerno argues that the self-help culture has gradually eroded our well-being since the 1960s by convincing us that we're dysfunctional. Despite our growing "emotional intelligence", the divorce rate is much higher than it was 50 years ago, more people are taking prescription drugs for mental unease and alcohol addiction has risen.
But can we really blame self-help for our ills? Of course not. Salerno is yet another clever emperor in new clothes. Rather than trying to make it as a self-help guru, he has become an anti-self-help guru. No doubt it's time for a backlash against sweeping, unscientific, misleading advice.
You can imagine the blurb for his next exposé: Not everyone can be rich and successful. Being happy all the time is unrealistic. You will lose in love. You will experience a lot of deeply disturbing stuff and maybe gain a little wisdom from it, while other people will get rich writing self-help books. That's life. Get on with it.
SHAM: How the Gurus of the Self-Help Movement Make Us Helpless, by Steve Salerno, is published by Nicholas Brealy, £10.99