Self-Help

Self Improvement

I think the first self help book I read was "Think and Grow Rich" by Nathaniel Hill, which was part of my first career attempt, as an insurance salesman.

As I remember it, I accepted the book as authoritative, partly because I had little life experience, and now I find myself telling my clients many of the same things that Nathaniel Hill advocated, that they need to be aware of and change thinking frequently, maybe as often as every 1/18th second, and that 1/18th of a second reference is from a book called "Flow" by M. Czikzentmihalyi, and I hoped the author's name is spelled correctly.

I also remember the "The Whole Earth Catalog" by Stuart Brand, I believe, from my college days, so there is definitely a history of self help in my life. Now I subscribe to Mother Earth News though, for my guidance on energy efficiency, for example.

I thought it might be interesting to include this take on self help by Dick Frak, which gives a history to the words self help.

By Frak, Dick

"On the face of it, self help is an attractive proposition because it appeals to our desire to remain in control and to our sense of involvement. It's also consistent with the recent policy signals of an evolution from modernisation to personalisation. But before things become generally obvious, they have a certain origin and history. In this article Dick Frak asks: What's the history of self help? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach and its implications for mental health? Should we be enthusiastic or cautious?

When the French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, was sent by the French government to America in 1831 to study the American prison system, he took copious notes on all aspects of American life. De Tocqueville published his observations as Democracy in America in 1835. He was particularly impressed by an American disposition for 'forever forming associations, whether religious, moral, serious, futile, very general or very limited'. He observed that 'As soon as Americans have conceived a sentiment or idea that they want to produce before the world, they seek each other out, and when found, they unite. Thenceforward they are no longer isolated individuals, but a power conspicuous from a distance whose actions serve as an example; when they speak, people listen.'

De Tocqueville's American contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, emphasizes the$vital importance of confidence based on self-trust in his essay Self-Reliance (1841). This finds an echo in modern self help manuals. The American psychiatrist, M Scott Peck, in his bestselling The Road Less Travelled (1978) advocates self- discipline, restraint and personal responsibility. So is there something culturally specific to America that made it the home of self help? And can it transfer to the UK mental health context?

The recent past

The most well-known contemporary examples of self-help in mental health have American origins. The mental health recovery movement is very much associated with the US disability rights movement of the 1970s and 1980s. But it dates back to 1937 and the work of a Chicago psychiatrist, Dr Abraham Low, who observed the need for some structure to continue to provide support to patients discharged from an institutional setting into a society without community mental health provision.

He envisaged the formation of self help groups of ex-patients. Dr Low led the first such self help group in November 1937, made up of 30 patients of the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute. He closely supervised this and other recovery self help groups through establishing an organisation known as Recovery Incorporated, which still exists in Chicago today. Many recovery self help groups were established across the US, and they played a part in developing the first user-only spaces that were important in the development of a user perspective on mental health and mental illness.

The Present

Self help in mental health is now most often regarded as self care and self management In the UK, mental health self management is most commonly associated with the programme for depression developed by The Manic Depression Fellowship. This course was originally developed from the generic Chronic Disease Self Management Programme developed at Stanford University by Professor Kate Lorig, who sees self management as managing life with a long term condition, increasing skills and self-confidence and taking part in problem solving and decision making. This struck a chord with UK policy makers driving government thinking about health - that there should be a more equal professional-patient relationship, improved patient information and support, as well as the promotion of greater self reliance. Welcome back, Mr Emerson! "

I remember as a youngster, with dreams of being an All-State Football player, writing to Darryl Royal who was the coach of the University of Texas football team, for training regimens.

I had read his book on football, and another by the baseball coach of the University of Minnesota, Dick Siebert, I believe, and I practiced those drills often as a boy dreaming of the "Bigs".

But then life intervened , and we leap forward a decade or two, when I found a book called Mega Brain by Michael Hutchinson, and I really got involved in self help. The book actually recommended a number of technologies that are viable for a number of issues, like Alph-Theta EEG biofeedback for alcoholism, and ADD/ADHD, and epilepsy, and Open Focus biofeedback, sound and light therapy, binaural beat for brain synchrony, Anna Wise and the Awakened Mind, Hemi-Synch from the Monroe Institute, for example. I am familiar with AA, and NA, and Adult Child of Alcoholic Parents, for example, which are self help movements which have changed lives.

But "MegaBrain" was marketed in a way which implied that by using it, one might become somehow "greater than, or better than" ones peers and I bought into that, which is mistake.

Self help tools have value, if for no other reason than the search, the attempt to break out of old routines and habits, but they will not make you superior. I believe that getting experience with self help tools provides confidence and comfort in non-traditional realms.

For example, after eight years of study of Chi Gong, I am comfortable with simply feeling good, when I thought that I would soon be levitating.

I am very confident that I am healthier as a result of that study, which is good for my children, but the world need not fear my taking over, or battling Zeus with lightening bolts.

Now there are, it seems, thousands of self help books and websites and tools, and there is no way I am going to attempt to evaluate or recommend all of them, but I will recommend some that I have tried.

Gravity sometimes doesn't work.

Some things are both waves and particles. . .at the same time.

Electrons simply disappear . . . all the time.

If the universe is this wild and unpredictable, so full of possibility, why are your thoughts about your own life so limited?

The physicist Niels Bohr asked, "How can an electron move from A to B, and never go in between?" Maybe the answer is within.

This tool is amazing. I have used it personally since 2001, and love it, and I have used it with hundreds of Anger Management and domestic violence clients in that time and it really helps folks get a handle on how thinking impacts physiology and how fast that happens.

I would rate this one 100%. Golfers use it to relax also.

This is another wonderful tool. Clients have to travel through the kingdom accomplishing some chores of various kinds utilizing their heart rate variability coherence and galvanic skin response. Don't worry, if you can breath regularly, this is easy to do.

This is the Internet's First Get Out of Debt Community, with a self help bootstrap side and a professional debt consolidation side. Please check out the blogs, free downloads, chat, and more.

E-Books for Your I-Pod-Hear2Read

Wellness Inventory