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The Harms of Self-Help Discourse

In today's post, Carme Isern-Mas (University of the Balearic Islands) discusses the potential harms of everyday self-help discourse in contexts of systemic oppression. Carme worked on this topic with Sally Latham (The Open University) and Manuel Almagro (University of Valencia). 


Carme Isern-Mas


When I was a teenager, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret took everyone by storm. For some time, conversations about how to better “manifest” our life goals, or on the importance of having a “positive attitude” were frequent. Later I learned about the self-help industry and how The Secret, among others, was a paradigmatic product of it. Criticisms of this cultural phenomenon were not long in coming. But, in recent years, the discourse of the self-help industry has also conquered our everyday talk. 


The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne


Everyone knows what “vision boards” are, most of us have tried to keep a “gratitude diary”, and we try to “stay positive” despite the adversity. A worry with such discourse becoming so pervasive is that their underlying principles, of which we tend to be unaware, become pervasive too. And in a world plagued with systemic oppression, the proliferation of these principles risks causing harm. This is what Sally Latham, Manuel Almagro and I aimed to analyze in our paper.

In the paper, after critically analyzing the content of highly influential works on self-help, we show how they all converge on a set of principles: 
  1. keep a positive attitude to “attract” positivity; 
  2. avoid negative thinking, and negative people, to prevent negative events; 
  3. be grateful so that you can be happier; 
  4. aim at self-knowledge to be “the best version of yourself”, and 
  5. take responsibility for your life. 

We argue that, because of these underlying principles, self-help discourse might cause harm when applied in contexts of systemic oppression. We identify three ways in which this could happen.

First, self-help discourse contributes to victim blaming. This happens because self-help discourse assumes that all problems, including systemic ones, can be solved by the relevant “psychological” expertise; that individuals alone can, and must, draw on that expertise to overcome these problems; and that, therefore, there is no excuse for failing to do so.

Second, self-help discourse carries epistemic risks. For instance, trying to share one’s experiences in cases of gender inequality or mental health suffering might be unsafe and risky, since one might be perceived as not trying hard enough to remove negativity from one’s life. As a result, people might adapt their testimonies to the principles of self-help (testimonial smothering), and struggle to access the relevant hermeneutical resources to understand and share their experiences (hermeneutical injustice).

Finally, self-help discourse also carries affective harms that reinforce oppression. In particular, it risks causing affective injustice by: adding emotional burdens on the oppressed, who need to manage their emotions in ways that align with the self-help principles; dismissing their emotional experiences of oppression; and imposing the emotional norms of dominant groups, based on productivity and success.

So no matter how many “vision boards” and “gratitude diaries” we use, the fact remains that many of us are victims of circumstance, environment, and inequality. Not only does self-help discourse fail to recognize this, but its use in contexts of systemic oppression also leads to further harms, as we have argued.
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