All Other Self Help Books are Stupid

Should we all try to be a little bit more content with our own lives? …Sure.

Should we engage in public dialogue on which pursuits are beneficial to living a happy life? …Well, okay, that makes sense.

Should we create approximately ten thousand different books telling people how to live happier, more meaningful lives, written by people who in general have always been pretty happy? …No. No, let’s not do that at all.

Ugh...
Allow me to explain: Let me string together a bunch of essentially meaningless platitudes - I will start with ‘Be Yourself’ and a serious of anecdotes explaining how you can be like me. Let me put it together with a condescending tone of one who is Truly Enlightened and therefore superior to you, sad grasshopper. Let me repeat myself over and over again, using illustrations drawn solely from my own life, and then pepper my monologue with non-contextualized wellness professional quotes or a poorly explained psychological study. Fifty pages and big print? No problem, I’ll add some quotes from the Dalai Llama.

And…Ta Da! There you have it. I have written every single self-help book that ever was.

If you yourself are looking to make a dollar in these hard economic times, perhaps you, too, should consider writing a self help book. Seriously, do - there are a lot of sad people out there, and those numbers keep on rising. Happiness projects, today, what the latest diet crazes were twenty years ago. In an increasingly obese population, who doesn’t want to be thin? And as more of use get diagnosed with depression or continue to face huge losses, self help authors offer us an allusive cure…why wouldn’t you buy their book? Don’t you want to be happier??

And therein lies the problem, I suppose. We all want to be happy- er, happier. And just like thinness or beauty or wealth, there apparently is no portion control or ‘happy’ medium. We want to be HAPPY, with smiley faces and rainbows and butterflies, dancing through Disney world with Santa Clause at our side, while a puppy dog injects us with heroin.

Perhaps you can sense the pitfalls of this insatiable pursuit - because life, you may find, has some innate shitiness. People die, and people stub their toes, and people face literally hundreds of events within a given day that warrant an emotionally healthy response which is not, in fact, Happy. We are desperate for a state that can never be achieved, and the casualties of this pursuit take many different forms (from the very human Octomom* to the lizard-esque Micheal Jackson, and everything in between).

My issue isn’t really even with that: the mentally healthy individuals who’s desire for perpetual bliss will never be satiated. In the end, they are, have been, and will always be ‘happy’ in the generic sense, experiencing the ups and downs that life has to offer and feeling some angst along the way. If they want to find a book and learn a happiness mantra, let them. But there are other people out there who are much, much, less happy, and my main issue is with them: self-help books prey upon the vulnerabilities and hopes of those who are significantly, clinically, and medically depressed, and that is not okay.

There are people for whom getting out of bed is a daily struggle. But don’t they get hungry for the deliciousness and wonder of food? Well, no, and that’s the point. Are they lazy, these people? Well, no, not exactly - must of us hem and haw about performing any arbitrary, strenuous, potentially painful chore. But for depressed people, pretty much everything in life has become that chore. These people are seriously hurting, and for them life has lost its intrinsic value which so many others feel completely, without question, to the point that its absence seems…crazy? Well, yes, kind of. Depression is a mental illness and a medical matter. It is a serious illness which will directly kill 15% of those diagnosed via suicide - the rest may be simply disabled, temporarily or periodically, throughout their lives, or come down with a cancer that they may otherwise have fought off (depression tends to increase a person’s odds of getting sick and worsen the outcome of any illness). The cause? Genetics, trauma, and hormonal changes - not exactly anything that can be prevented. But why would I blemish an article on happiness with such a depressing, miserable subject? Shouldn’t we focus on happy things?

Unfortunately, any discussion on Self Help Books, like the industry itself, could not function without depressed people. Self Help books prey on those for whom happiness is truly, chemically elusive - they offer a bittersweet hope that if a person reads enough, believes enough, and wants it enough, that the depression will lift. While there are strategies an individual can use on their own to address mild depression, few self help books spend much time on those principles. For individuals with moderate to severe depression, the effect can be harmful - a book claiming it can lead a severely depressed person to happiness is the psychological equivalent to telling a patient with chest pain that he can lower his blood pressure with sunshine and lemon drops - as explained in my all new self help book, only $19.99!!

If I were to write that book, I suspect that someone would sue me, and at the very least a doctor or concerned parent would become indignant. But there are thousands of books claiming that they can lead unenlightened folk to blissful ecstasy - books which are pored over by individuals desperate for a solution to chemical imbalances and a shrunken hypothalamus.

Every single book I have issue with has been written by an author for whom mental health has never been a concern - they centre around a philosophy which is deeply personal (and therefore not especially applicable to readers). There are exactly two target audiences - those who are too depressed to be helped by these books, or those who are not depressed at all but have been suckered by a society that can never be too happy. Neither groups will be helped - one group may seriously be harmed. I hate you, Self Help Books.

To learn more, please buy my book. I call it: All Other Self Help Books Are Stupid - Except for This Self Help Book, Which Is Actually The Key To Happiness - A Personal Journey by Ivy Donegal.


*I have a lot of sympathy for Octomom. Yes, she seems selfish and naïve. No, she shouldn’t have had fourteen kids while living in her mom’s two bedroom house. I get that. But being scrutinized on a national stage has led to one fact which seems indisputable - that woman loves her kids like crazy. Her face is full of joy and care when she is around them, and she wants to give her whole life to them (and yes, fourteen kids probably deserve more than one full life, but nonetheless). She should have not had a great deal of those children, probably - but then again, 75% of all pregnancies probably never should have happened (and that’s probably a gross underestimate). The only thing that makes this case different from the Catholic family down the street from my mom’s house (thirteen kids, abuse, divorce, and no paparazzi) is that she had eight children at once. Smart she may not be, and unethical her fertility doctors certainly were, but at the centre of it is a woman who wants the best for her children, and that’s okay with me.