Reddit reviews Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless

There's a book about self-help books that really helped me: SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless. It's a skeptical investigation of the Self-Help and Actualization Movement (or SHAM) that will help you identify which books not to waste your money on.

That said, if you are looking for a cognitive behavioral therapy book, Feeling Good seems to be legitimate. I haven't read the latest edition, but early editions were free of woo and it describes practices that represent the current thinking on cognitive-behavioral therapy among medical professionals. I tend to look down on self-help books with scorn, but this one appealed to my sense of logic and reasoning.

You're using the wrong acronym. This is part of the Self Help and Actualization Movement - so you should call it SHAM.

Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless
Review of the book

my quip regarding atheism is that i believe in just one less god than a monotheist

that usually gets them thinking. then i say to them that they are atheists - about loki, zues, the australian aboriginal dream time rainbow serpent and every other god of the thousands on godchecker that aren't their specific one.

atheism has had a profound effect on my life. Let me provide a brief autobiography (this is /r/IAMA after all!) I was born into the belief in Sai Baba, even though I grew up in Australia. Hence my mentioning him in the OP. All of my life until i was 17 my family believed in him. i wasn't keen, but i went along with it because i was a member of the family. then one afternoon Dad came into my room and said he'd just read an article that Sai Baba was a paedophile. I was pretty surprised, but I think he was the one who was the most shocked. Because he had spent half of his life believing this god man was God on Earth. Obviously the Indian Rationalists still have a long way to go and if you're looking for a REAL charity to support rather than the Xians at World Vision, send some cash to them. They run critical thinking workshops in outback villages of India, showing the locals the sleight of hand tricks the godmen, such as Sai Baba, use.

so obviously i very promptly lost the skerrick of belief in sai baba that had managed to survive until that point. but it didn't make me an atheist. that took until the third(!) year of my psych degree, a good 5-6 years later, when all of my critical thinking, research methods and general analytical training finally sank in. you have to understand that it wasn't just sai baba. i had layers and layers. i was also born into one of the biggest cults in australia, the universal brotherhood (vaguely recent documentary, shorter youtube). my father was one of the founding members. the break up of that cult seriously fucked with our family, but i think the experience had the greatest impact on my Dad and my step brother, who came along with his/our mother to the cult, where she met Dad. In the Compass documentary they talk of things such as 'silent time', where if you did something wrong you were excluded from the group for a long period via distance and having to keep silent. Dad was victimised in this way sometimes, although he's reluctant to talk about a lot of it and is very keen only to talk of the good things. I half wonder if it's to save us kids. Regarding my step brother, he had serious issues and needed a child psychologist from what i have gathered. but because it was a cult they couldn't endorse the outside world by turning to a child psych within it, so they tried to deal with his problems their own way. based on prior descriptions, you can imagine what that was.

so that was that bit, but then the family promptly moved interstate to be with what they thought was the best school in Australia, a waldorf school. This was a movement started by rudolf steiner. just to keep up the cultishness. you may have heard lots of good things about this type of school, but that's only superficial. these schools do not prepare children for the mainstream and i emerged after 12 years with a profound belief in my superiority and purity over regular people, swine, from 'outside'. I spent the first three years of university getting over myself and beginning to trust normal people. I have since reversed my original position, believing now that people from everyday schools are smarter, better and stronger. Waldorf schools also don't make you smart. They don't teach critical thinking, in fact, one of the classes in YEAR TWELVE involved teaching astronomy AND ASTROLOGY in the same lesson. This class was taken by the math teacher.

Pretty much sums it up.

Hence I had a hell of a lot of catching up to do when I hit the real world. But I wasn't quite out of the woods when I finished Waldorf, second top of the class mind you. I still went on to complete a Wholistic Psychology Certificate IV - which was basically a $AU3-4000 course in all the alt psych/self help/pop psychology hogwash written about so eloquantly by Salerno. But there was more! I also completed a number of pranic healing courses. Basically this involves waving your hands around and letting coloured energy come out of them to cure people of stuff. Curiously, the leader had an early death, aged 54 of the quite unremarkable illness, pneumonia! All of this extra study I was doing concurrently with my psych degree, so I was certainly displaying some cognitive processing power but no sign of putting it to good use yet! By the way I wrote a funny article comparing these courses and my psych degree which fits here too.

Anyway I can’t remember what finally tipped me over but I think it was a combination of LiveJournal’s atheism forum and Richard Dawkins/Sam Harris etc who were beginning to reach prominence then. Although I do remember debating the existence of god with my cousin many times at our grandparents’ house when we were about 6 or 7, so it’s not like I’ve been a one eyed believer. He still believes though. He’s gotten more fundamental whilst I’ve gone antitheist. Part of my finally making it over the line was even to join the Atheist Foundation of Australia for a year, but then I stopped as it just seemed a bit of an amateurish organisation.

So I started off by saying my life has been radically improved by atheism. This is because I’ve stopped spending all this money on new age therapies and courses like pranic healing and wholistic psychology, for instance. A recent example though, is my mother having cancer and I have been able to use my knowledge of critical thinking to help other family members understand why conventional rather than alternative treatments have more efficacy. I never realised just how far apart in terms of thinking we have become. In terms of actual atheism, the main way in which it has improved my life is via my being able to appreciate the quote to end all quotes:

"Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are all stardust. You couldn't be here if stars hadn't exploded. Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren't created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here today." Lawrence Krauss
Getting back to an earlier point that atheism allows us to appreciate things as being good simply because that’s the way they are, not because of divine endorsement, I think this quote is a supreme example of the hazard of seeking such supernatural origins. You miss the true mindsplitting grandeur of our existence. Often I heard new age people and god believers say that spiritual practices put you in touch with the world around you, to really feel the energy. Well due to my strong agreement with this general motivation, I’ll take atheism and the worldview of Krauss’ quote, as it achieves that unity to a far greater, more spectacular and edifying degree than any religious text ever written or spiritual inspiration ever ecstatically received.