Why self-help is not always helpful

 “Self-love is the balance between accepting yourself as you are while knowing you deserve better, and then working towards it.”

― Vex King, Good Vibes, Good Life: How Self-Love Is the Key to Unlocking Your Greatness

‘Self-help’ is a movement and an industry. The rhetoric of self-help includes self-knowledge, self-change, self-improvement, self-understanding, self-mastery, self- motivation and self-love. It all sounds positive, yet there is a darker side to the self-help movement, particularly surrounding illness.  

Self-help literature prioritises self-knowledge and honesty, with self-assessment scales and questionnaires designed to increase knowledge of our own strengths and weaknesses, giving us the ‘truth’ about ourselves (Rimke 2000: 67-68).  The emphasis on self suggests that power is being given to the individual. But the rhetoric of self-help can be used to perpetuate existing power relations under the guise of voluntary ‘self-improvement’. 

Self-love

According to Rimke, we defer to experts in psychology, because we assume that all problems are psychological ones and that psychology can make us happy and ‘normal’. ‘Self-help is the logical extension of a psychologistically oriented culture in which psychology enjoys cultural authority as a form of expert knowledge’ (Rimke 2000: 63). Power operates through self-help with cunning sleight of hand. We are told to love ourselves, to be responsible for our own psychological states but also improve and conform to social psychological benchmarks. 

Self-help rhetoric is full of neoliberal ideals. In brief, neoliberalism is a political and economic ideology favouring capitalism, free market competition and minimal government interference. Neoliberalism can lead to a hyper-individualist, meritocratic outlook where individuals are the authors of their own success and failure (Franssen 2020: 102). The emphasis on self in self-care literature reinforces this. 

However neoliberalism is also accused of exacerbating social inequalities due to excessive individualism and a failure to recognise that individual vulnerabilities are often the result of social and economic disadvantages. There is evidence that for people with mental illness such as bipolar disorder, the internalisation of meritocratic world views, in which individual success or failure is perceived as the result of their own efforts (or lack thereof), results in self-stigmatisation and increased feelings of guilt or shame (Rüsch, Todd et al. 2010). 

If we are being told that ‘individuals possess the ability to choose happiness over unhappiness, success over failure, and even health over illness’ (Rimke 2000: 73) then the implication is that those who fail to recover simply made bad choices or failed to master their own psychology, diverting attention from the forces of power that can actually make structural changes. This is victim-blaming of the most vulnerable.

This dark side of self-help is a type of hermeneutical injustice that is not simply an absence of the appropriate hermeneutical resources needed to make sense of a social experience (Fricker 2007). It is not that we lack the concepts of inequality or neglect in healthcare. Rather, it is a case of what Falbo describes as a species of hermeneutical injustice where there is an ‘overabundance of distorting and oppressive concepts’ which crowd out, defeat or pre-empt the application of a more accurate concept (Falbo 2022: 353). 

In many cases of illness, a failure to recover would be appropriately understood in terms of inequality, disadvantage or neglect. But these concepts are replaced by a hyper-individualised, neoliberal meritocratic ideology, perpetuated by self-help literature. The very movement that is meant to increase self-knowledge becomes hijacked in a way that diverts attention from the structural inequalities that those in power should be addressing, instead blaming the victims of those inequalities. When this happens, self-help rhetoric is not only unhelpful, it is harmful. 

Sally Latham is a PhD student with the Open University and recipient of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Jacobson Studentship. She is soon to submit her thesis arguing for a non-narrative approach to mental health.