SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless

this book is a necessary read for anyone interested in self-help. Despite the fact that i am strongly opposed to some of the conclusions drawn - and am currently engaged in dialogue with the author and on his blog in regards to this opposition - i cannot stress strongly enough that SHAM as a movement is profoundly damaging and disturbing to say the least. With a business focused almost exclusively on the provision of marketing services to the 'wellness' industry, and as a former SHAM practitioner myself, i see all too often the emphasis that individuals place on methodology over results. The most significant argument contained in SHAM is that if my business is focused on helping you, and my business model is dependant upon repeat business, how effective is my business at helping you? A more than reasonable question, and one that the author argues, quite convincingly, should be asked by more SHAM advocates. I am recommending to all of my clients to read this book. It's about time someone came out and attacked those who attack from 'the moral high ground'.

I read some of these reader reviews and I can't escape the idea that some of these people, though perhaps well intentioned, are reacting to Salerno's book in theory, rather that in fact. Having read the book, cover to cover, I can testify to the fact that Salerno delivers on all the promise of his title, and then some. As he states, there is no other industry in America that generates this kind of revenue for its practitioners, $8.5 billion per year, and is held to fewer (or more relaxed) standards in terms of what benefits it PROVABLY furnishes to its addicts--wait, excuse me, customers. As the author points out, this is a nation founded on the lure of unlimited hope. But hope alone is not the same as reality. Believing in hope, especially when that hope is false and can be disproved by a simple exercise in logic, cannot possibly be productive. Worse yet is when the charlatans at the top of the self-help movement purposely keep people coming back, or create whole new classes of victim/customers, by making people who are just fine (or were, till the gurus themselves got hold of them) think they have some crippling flaw that can be conquered only by remaining slaves to the charlatans' preachments. This book is worth the money for the chapters on Alternative Medicine and the Sports Motivation alone! READ THE BOOK. Don't prejudge. Don't say you refuse to read the book because you "need hope to survive." False hope will only let you down. You'll end up in the same place you were going to end up anyway, except you'll be poorer for what you paid the self-help gurus to (supposedly) cure you. Those are my feelings, anyway, for what they're worth.

I saw the author on CNN the other night, bought the book the following day, and am quite impressed with the depth of Mr. Salerno's research, as well as his shrewdness at deductively and inductively stringing together various trends and social phenomena in making his case about the self-help movement's destructive effect on American life. As I sat down to write this review this morning, I was struck by the fact that the previous reviewer, in essence, wrote an extended advertisement for the self-help movement, and even his own services! I then read down the entire list of reviews, and this seems to typify so many of those who attack this book. They either have a personal stake in sustaining the illusion that self-help works, or seem determined to remain in denial ("I've already made up my mind, so don't confuse me with facts") so they can justify continuing to feed their own addictions. That is exactly the case that Mr. Salerno makes in his book, and one of the chief reasons why self-help is so dangerous: It becomes addictive, and like any addiction, people will find all sorts of ways of rationalizing their behavior to allow them to remain addicted. I particularly liked the author's point that it's not up to him to show that self-help doesn't work--even though he does a good job of this, though he is occasionally prone to overstatement; I can forgive him for this. Rather, it's up to the industry/movement itself to show that what they're selling does work. For $8 billion a year, we should expect nothing less.

I put "cultural" in quotes because it would elevate self-help to too high a status to regard it legitimately as an aspect of culture. But the larger point is that I borrowed the book (yes, I admit, I borrowed it) from a friend after reading about it on Bernie Goldberg's site. I read the whole thing in one night, and I was blown away by author Salerno's story-behind-the-story of so many of the phenomena we take for granted as being "political" in nature. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes to peel back the facade and see what really makes things tick! It will open your eyes to the root causes of a lot of unfortunate goings-on in American society.

Salerno has bitten off a monumental task here in essentially trying to explain, or at least comprehend, all that has happened in American society and mores over the past 30 or 40 years, since self-help-mania took hold. Having read all of the literature on self-help beginning with Wendy Kaminer's "I'm Dysfunctional," this book impresses me because unlike earlier works on the topic, it demonstrates how the so-called logic of what Salerno calls "SHAM" has spread outside its own universe to corrupt the mainstream of American thought and behavior. I think the book is worth it for Salerno's blistering critique of Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12 steps alone. In truth, this becomes something of a running theme, appearing in no less than two or three major places in the book, and yet it seems appropriate that he spend so much time on it since it anchors his whole "house of cards" argument about the rest of self-help, much of which was patterned on the original 12 steps. AA's widespread acceptance in society--despite the near-total lack of evidence for its usefulness and the cheapening impact it has had on the perception of individual responsibility--is a prime example of Salerno's basic premise about the subtle ways SHAM has hijacked American thought. At the same time, his counterintuitive denunciations of empowerment, where he brilliantly outlines the harm done by the simple-minded "givens" in today's ever-hopeful society (self-esteem etc.), should be required reading among American children, or at least contestants in American Idol. This is not a perfect book, and at times I was frustrated by Salerno's failure to tie up all the loose ends. In fairness, as he himself notes at the end of the book, a definitive explanation of the transformation of American culture over the past half-century would've required a "work of anthropology." And since so many of the factors that bear upon American society are interrelated, it is probably impossible to separate out all the factors and reckon their individual effect. Also, I think he's correct in saying that your answers to some of the questions he poses depend on deeply held personal beliefs about free will, innate differences between men and women, etc. But at least he asks the questions. His arguments in the area of alternative medicine and what he calls Sportsthink are particularly strong, raising troubling points I'd never considered, even as I myself sometimes fell under the wing of today's "empowering" movement. For these reasons and others, I am more than willing to overlook the occasional missing link in his chain of causation. This is an important book whose time is now. Give it to a self-help junkie you love. They may hate you for it, but you'll know you did them a service.