Based on the author's extensive reportingand the inside look at the industry he got while working at a leading "lifestyle" publisherSHAM shows how thinly credentialed "experts" now dispense advice on everything from mental health to relationships to diet to personal finance to business strategy. Americans spend upward of $8 billion every year on self-help programs and products. And those staggering financial costs are actually the least of our worries.
SHAM demonstrates how the self-help movement's core philosophies have infected virtually every aspect of American lifethe home, the workplace, the schools, and more. And Salerno exposes the downside of being uplifted, showing how the "empowering" message that dominates self-help today proves just as damaging as the blame-shifting rhetoric of self-help's "Recovery" movement.
SHAM also reveals:
How self-help gurus conduct extensive market research to reach the same customers over and overwithout ever helping them
The inside story on the most notorious gurusfrom Dr. Phil to Dr. Laura, from Tony Robbins to John Gray
How your company might be wasting money on motivational speakers, "executive coaches," and other quick fixes that often hurt quality, productivity, and morale
How the Recovery movement has eradicated notions of personal responsibility by labeling just about anythingfrom drug abuse to "sex addiction" to shopliftinga dysfunction or disease
How Americans blindly accept that twelve-step programs offer the only hope of treating addiction, when in fact these programs can do more harm than good
How the self-help movement inspired the disastrous emphasis on self-esteem in our schools
How self-help rhetoric has pushed people away from proven medical treatments by persuading them that they can cure themselves through sheer application of will
As Salerno shows, to describe self-help as a waste of time and money vastly understates its collateral damage. And with SHAM, the self-help industry has finally been called to account for the damage it has done.