Is self-help a scam?
Good question.
I would say that yes, the vast majority of what is sold out in the self-help Industry is a scam.
Here is a free ebook, that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about self-help.
Psychological Self-Help
http://mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/
That's a good article, and its from the new book
Sham : How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless by Steve Salerno.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400054095/102-3603665-1692139?v=glance
I have not read the book yet, but I ordered it from the library, and am looking forward to reading it very soon.
This "personal coaching" is a craze, and its excesses will lead to its demise. You can't have countless untrained and unqualified people trying to go out and charge hundreds an hour for giving advice. This "coaching" field is riddled with scammers, in my view. The reason why so many people are promoting it, is that it is all profit. All you need is a phone, or an office. Its like therapy, but you don't have to get a license.
Of course there are plenty of folks out there who can do good work with people. But they are in the minority, and not so easy to find.
There are even companies who sell "phone coaching" to people with costs well in excess of $400-$600 an hour, and these same "coaches" are pitching products and services at the same people they are "coaching".
Not only is much of this coaching a SHAM, it can also be a good old-fashioned scam.
Here is Part 1 of this article.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,170-1723312,00.html
Self-help books? Don’t bother. They won’t help
Steve Salerno
Our correspondent spent 16 months editing self-help manuals for a big publisher — and decided that the business is a sham that exploits our weaknesses for profit
SELF-HELP IS AN enterprise wherein people holding the thinnest of credentials diagnose, in basically normal people, symptoms of inflated or invented maladies, so that they may then implement remedies that have never been shown to work.
For more than a generation, the Self-Help and Actualisation Movement — felicitously enough, the words form the acronym Sham — has been talking out of both sides of its mouth, promising relief from all that ails you while promoting nostrums that almost guarantee nothing will change (unless it gets worse).
Along the way, Sham has filled the bank accounts of a slickly packaged breed of false prophets, including, but by no means limited to, high-profile authors, motivational speakers, self-styled group counsellors, “life coaches” and any number of wise-men-without-portfolio who have promised to deliver some level of enhanced contentment. For a fat fee.
Between 2000 and 2004 the market for self-improvement in the US grew by 50 per cent. Today, it is an industry that grosses $8.56 billion (£4.8 billion) annually. And what has America got in return for its investment?