Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless

In fact, by 1983, so substantial were sales figures for books of this genre that the lofty New York Times Book Review, which for decades fought the good fight on behalf of books written by actual writers, threw in the towel and added another category, “Advice Books,” to its distinguished best-seller list.

Archie Brodsky, a senior research associate for the Program in Psychiatry and the Law at Harvard Medical School. “Psychotherapy has a chancy success rate even in a one-on-one setting over a period of years,” observes Brodsky, who coauthored (with Stanton Peele) Love and Addiction. “How can you expect to break a lifetime of bad behavioral habits through a couple of banquet-hall seminars or by sitting down with some book?

In sum, Victimization and Recovery have relentlessly encouraged ordinary people with ordinary lives to conceive of themselves as victims of some lifelong ailment that, even during the best of times, lurks just beneath the surface, waiting to undo them.

For someone whose stock in trade is the precise, life-changing use of language, Robbins can be surprisingly careless with it. Promotional materials describing his new line of nutritional products twice refer to one of the key ingredients as collodials instead of colloidals.

…what mostly distinguish[ed] self-help gurus from laypeople is the former group’s ability to “write well enough to get a book deal.” The Internet eliminates even that “credential,” modest as it is, thus further lowering the bar. It allows people who couldn’t get a book deal to direct-market their self-published (or, increasingly, e-published) wares and become viable niche players in the burgeoning relationships market.