Self Help Information
Introduction to Self Help
The basis for self-help is often self-reliance, publicly available information, or support groups where people with similar problems join together. From early exemplars in self-driven legal practice and home-spun advice, the connotations of the phrase have spread and often apply particularly to education, business, psychological or psychotherapeutic nostrums, purveyed through the popular genre of self-help books and through self-help personal-development movements. 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. Any health condition can find a self help method or group such as parents of the mentally ill. But there are limits and these methods do not work for everyone. As well as experienced long time members sharing experiences with a similar practical problem such as finances of a health problem, these health groups can become lobby groups and educational material clearing houses. Those who help themselves by learning about health problems are helping themselves through self help. But self help in this context is often really peer-to-peer support.
Self Help Marketplace
Research firm Market data estimated the "self-improvement" market as worth $8.5 billion in 2003 — including infomercials, mail-order catalogs, holistic institutes, books, audio cassettes, motivational speaker seminars, the personal coaching market, weight-loss and stress-management programs. Market data projected that the total market size would grow to over $11 billion by 2008.
Within the context of this larger market, group and corporate attempts to aid the "seeker" have moved into the "self-help" marketplace, with LGATs and psychotherapy systems ready with more or less pre-packaged solutions to instruct people seeking their own individual betterment.
There is also a market of computer self help books such as the Dummies Guides and the The Complete Idiot's Guide to....
History
The authors of First Things First invoke wisdom literature dating back as far as 2500 B.C. as a validation of their...
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Criticisms
Some critics have suggested that self-help books and programs offer "easy answers" to difficult personal
Sociological theories
The self-help philosophy relies more on first-hand knowledge (or folk knowledge)...