Self-help or
self- improvement refers to self-guided improvement—economically, intellectually, or emotionally—most
frequently with a substantial
psychological or spiritual basis.
The basis for self-help is often self-reliance, publicly available information, or support groups where people with similar problems join together. From early exemplars in self-driven legal practice and home-spun advice, the connotations of the phrase have spread and often apply particularly to education, business, psychological or psychotherapeutic nostrums, purveyed through the popular genre of self-help books and through self-help personal-development movements. According to the
APA Dictionary of Psychology, potential benefits of self help groups that professionals may not be able to provide include friendship, emotional support, experiential knowledge, identity, meaningful roles, and a sense of belonging. Any health condition can find a self help method or group such as parents of the mentally ill. But there are limits and these methods do not work for everyone. As well as experienced long time members sharing experiences with a similar practical problem such as finances of a health problem, these health groups can become lobby groups and educational material clearing houses. Those who help themselves by learning about health problems are helping themselves through self help. But self help in this context is often really peer-to-peer support.
Sociological theories of self-help
An expansion of the
technologies that empower individuals to conduct both trivial and profound activities binds together the diverse genres which apply self-help concepts. Self-help book-publishing arose from decentralization of ideology, from a growth of publishing industries using expanded printing technologies and (at the pinnacle of growth) from the spread of new psychological sciences. Likewise, self-help legal services grew around expanded access to document-production technology (viz: the printing industry in the 18th century). The Internet, with the ever-expanding selection of commercial and information services which it offers for free, exemplifies movement toward self-help on a grand scale