‘Up to you’: Self-help books,depression and the reconstruction of reading

Abstract

Like other consumers of ‘low-brow’ genres, self-help readers elicit polarized views in the literature. While little research to date has focused specifically on self-help readers with a history of mental illness, existing commentary reveals a particular tension: on the one hand, clinical researchers report positive outcomes for depressed readers engaged in bibliotherapy programs using self-help books, similar or superior to medication or talk therapy; on the other, scholars of media and culture express misgivings about the quality of self-help texts and highlight the negative potential of therapeutic discourse for individual readers and audiences more generally. By asking what actual readers do with self-help books, however, my research suggests an altogether more complex interaction between readers and the books they choose and use – especially as they navigate experiences of mental illness. Leveraging a reader-response heuristic in which I interviewed a cohort of Australian readers, this paper details some of the ways in which habitual consumers of self-help books describe their own interpretive activities, problematizing previous research that either emphasizes or downplays the significant expertise of vernacular audiences.

Introduction

‘The self-help genre will always be in fashion,’ concluded Wendy Kaminer in the closing remarks of her 1993 treatise, I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional (p. 165). More than 20 years later, Jessica Lamb-Shapiro (2014) confirmed that it is ‘nearly impossible to live in the world and escape self-help’ (p. 3). For decades now, millions of readers have been winning friends and influencing people (Carnegie, 1936), taking the road less travelled (Peck, 1976), feeling the fear and doing it anyway (Jeffers, 1987) and not sweating the small stuff (Carlson, 1997). More recently, best-selling authors have urged readers to ‘lean in’ (Sandberg, 2013), ‘find their why’ (Sinek, 2017) and ‘dare to lead’ (Brown, 2018).

Among the array of self-help books available to readers, titles that address the encroaching mental health crisis cannot be ignored. A type of ‘problem-focused’ self-help literature (Bergsma, 2008), books that target depression either explicitly or incidentally have emerged as a significant subset of the broader tradition (Richardson et al., 2008). Beginning with David Burns’s Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, first published in 1980, they have continued to proliferate, giving rise to what some have dubbed the ‘prose not Prozac’ movement (Neville, 2013). In Australia, as elsewhere around the world, self-help books are now routinely recommended and used in professional clinical practice (e.g. Smith et al., 2017) and, for many readers, offer a discreet and cost-effective means of accessing psychological ‘expertise’ (Norcross, 2010). In fact, according to Ad Bergsma (2008), self-help books may be ‘the most important – although not the most reliable – channel through which psychological insights find their way to the general audience’ (p. 342).

In 1989, Steven Starker commented that ‘scant attention [had] been paid by researchers to the reactions of purchasers and readers of self-help works’ (p. 150). In the intervening decades, health researchers and media scholars alike have investigated the cultural and clinical significance of self-help books; however, reader experience remains an under-researched field, particularly in the context of mental illness. Research to date has focused primarily on evaluating efficacy in structured trials or giving close readings from numerous critical frameworks. While these two bodies of research offer important insights into both the positive and problematic potential of self-help discourse, neither adequately addresses how actual readers choose and use texts that explicitly claim to help or transform.

In this paper, therefore, I am not attempting to excavate particular meanings that are sedimented in self-help texts or to ascertain whether they ‘work’ as a form of therapy – what self-help books do – but instead to discover what readers do with self-help books. If ‘the passively consuming audience is a thing of the past’ (Morley, 1993: 13), I ask, what type of ‘active audience’ do self-help readers constitute? How do readers with a history of depression make self-help books meaningful, if indeed they do, and how does self-help reading figure in their experiences of mental illness? Can patterns be observed among these readers’ often private and individualistic readings? The following discussion draws on interview data, generated within a reader-reception framework, to characterize some of the ways that readers with a diagnosis of depression experience and enact their reading of self-help books. In particular, I respond to Paul Lichterman’s (1992) earlier work involving readers of popular psychology texts, in which he coined the term ‘thin culture’ to describe the manner in which readers share an understanding that ‘the words and concepts put forth in these books can be read and adapted loosely, tentatively, sometimes interchangeably, without enduring conviction’ (p. 426). However, where Lichterman emphasizes ambivalence, I wish to highlight the significant agency and authority that self-help readers employ as they assemble various narratives and techniques to navigate their own experiences of mental illness, expanding existing – and largely Americocentric – analysis to a more diffuse Western audience.

Depression and self-help reading: a survey of the literature

In seminal research addressing the ways that readers engage with popular texts – namely romance novels and women’s magazines – scholars such as Janice Radway and Joke Hermes have noted the way that critique overwhelmingly ‘shows concern rather than respect’ for readers and generates a power differential between so-called ‘ordinary’ readers and those who study them (Hermes, 1995: 1; see also Radway, 1991). Historically, readers of self-help books, like other readers of ‘low-brow’ genres, have evoked not only concern but sometimes also derision in both mainstream media and academic commentary. Wendy Kaminer (1993), for example, claims that contemporary self-help discourse is ‘anathema to independent thought’ (p. 6) and generates a population of ‘atomized automatons’ (p. 55) who ‘blindly apply general rules to their idiosyncratic situations’ (p. 141), while Steve Salerno (2005) identifies a ‘desperate audience’ (p. 165) targeted by an ‘enterprise wherein people holding the thinnest of credentials diagnose in basically normal people symptoms of inflated or invented maladies, so that they may then implement remedies that have never been shown to work’ (p. 2). Feminist scholars in particular have criticized the self-help genre for victimizing women through its emphasis on individual rather than structural change, contending that ‘self-help books are relentlessly trying to perfect or improve women, teaching them to “privatize, individualize, and pathologize” their problems’ (Grodin, 1991).

This tenor of concern only intensifies in analyses that evaluate self-help literature from a Foucauldian perspective. A number of articles published since the turn of the century align self-help discourse closely with Western (traditionally American) capitalist impulses, calling attention to the subtle and often strategic ways in which published works express political ideologies and emphasize personal agency and liability at the expense of addressing pervasive social problems (McDonald & O’Callaghan, 2008; McGee, 2005; Mclean, 2013; Redden, 2002; Rimke, 2000). In her case study of Feeling Good, one of few addressing depression-focused texts, Brigid Philip (2009) describes the way in which psychological expertise is ‘arranged’ in self-help discourse to confer truthfulness, authority and ethical legitimacy upon the advice that authors divulge, encouraging readers to regulate their own thoughts and behaviours in accordance with neoliberal values. In this way, self-help for the management of mental illness fulfils a purpose as a ‘technology’ of government that stifles our understanding of the complex lived realities of depression and, in fact, limits how individuality might be expressed. Robin Allwood (1996), reflecting on a broader corpus, suggests that ‘the advice and instruction about how to deal with “depression” offered in this form of popular psychology is neither consistent nor unproblematic’ (p. 17), and that, by promoting a liberal humanist tradition that foregrounds self-regulation and personal responsibility, its true beneficiaries include ‘authors, publishers and the State’ (p. 35).

One of the most obvious underlying problems in such analyses is that, as Scott McLean (2013) points out, ‘studies tend to interpret the meaning of self-help books and then impute the supposed impact of those books on those who read them’ (p. 375). Implicit in this process is the assumption that readers synthesize and internalize the texts in a simple cause-and-effect relationship, a deterministic and mechanistic way of thinking that pays little attention to the socially embedded nature of reading and the more powerful and unpredictable ways that readers make use of texts. ‘Despite its brilliance’, Eva Illouz (2008) argues, a Foucauldian approach will not ultimately suffice when assessing therapeutic discourse because its sweeping generalities ‘flatten the complexity of the social’ and ‘fail to take the critical capacities of actors seriously’ (p. 4).

Over the last 30 years, concern for self-help readers has also propelled a substantial body of clinical research. In a now infamous paper published in 1987, psychiatrist Gerald Rosen called into question the safety and value of ‘treatment books’, asserting that ‘commercial factors, rather than professional standards’, had been driving their proliferation in the 20th century (p. 48). He also expressed misgivings about the way in which some readers, without appropriate guidance from a physician, might misunderstand or misapply instructions, attempt to use the wrong techniques to manage their condition, develop negative feelings about themselves or others should the therapy ‘fail’ and invest less trust in future therapies. As perhaps the most vocal scholar on the subject of the safety and efficacy of commercially available self-help books, Rosen’s (1987) comments prompted heated debate and a spate of further research attempting to assess the quality and reliability of self-help books. Although some scholars maintain that the evidence base for self-help reading as a treatment for depression remains unconvincing (e.g. Anderson et al., 2005; Gellatly et al., 2007; Haeffel, 2010; Richardson et al., 2010), a sizable corpus of international studies now exists demonstrating that the programs prescribed in some books can have comparable results to face-to-face therapy or pharmacological interventions, pose little danger to the reader (Halliday, 1991) and generate sustained improvement over time (e.g. Cuijpers 1997; Gould & Clum, 1993; Marrs, 1995; Scogin et al., 1990; Smith et al., 2017).

Considering the potential of commercially available books from a clinical angle not only acknowledges the genuine utility of reading as a powerful intervention but also goes some way towards attending to the central problematic of traditional textual analysis: that it conflates academic interpretation with effects on the reader and assumes that such readings can stand as ‘representative of all adequate readings’ (Radway, 1983: 54). However, efficacy studies, by their very nature, typically attempt to measure the outcomes of reading rather than try to understand their type or quality. By testing participants before and after engagement in reading programs – usually using standardized instruments such as the Beck Depression Inventory (see Cuijpers, 1997) – clinical research designs overwhelmingly conceptualize ‘help’ only in terms of a perceptible and sustained reduction in symptoms of depression. In other words, they focus on how particular therapies perform when provided in written format, which is ‘not unlike the broader problem of deciding whether psychotherapy has really been useful’ (Starker, 1989: 153). Some critics have pointed out that self-help materials are often developed and customized for the purposes of a given study and do not reflect what is available at the bookstore, or that the books routinely recommended by physicians may not necessarily be those that succeed commercially (Scogin et al., 1990: 45). Efficacy measures likewise reflect the outcomes of controlled studies in which individuals participate in structured programs, accessing an appropriate text and then reading it in a timely, linear fashion. The results may not generalize to way readers behave in the so-called real world. Starker (1989) notes that, ‘even if found to be reasonably effective when prescribed for a particular problem, the helpfulness of any published self-help program remains in doubt once it is totally self-selected and self-administered’ (p. 167).

By turning our attention to the specificity of vernacular reading, we can see that readers interact with self-help texts in more complex ways that are customarily diluted or even obscured in both content analyses and in studies that assess particular outcomes of reading under contrived conditions. Rather than representing a ‘passive audience through which ideological messages diffuse’ (Lichterman, 1992: 423), or a cohort engaged obediently in carefully facilitated clinical trials, consumers of self-help books seem readily able to devise their own strategies for engaging meaningfully with commercially available self-help books as both discourse and commodity – forms of expertise that are remarkably consistent across reader studies despite differences in their context and composition.

While the individuals who participated in my study likewise articulated varying degrees of engagement with self-help books, what emerged from their reflections was a coherent narrative in which experienced readers made use of the books in increasingly assured and strategic ways. Importantly, however, they also described a process through which they had re-evaluated their expectations of self-help books over time, and with repeated exposure and practice, so that lower expectations yielded more positive and useful negotiations with therapeutic discourse.

Self-help in the reader: a ‘soft ethnographic’ approach

Although reader-oriented analyses have typically focused on literary works, they are, I argue, particularly well suited to interrogating the experience of therapeutic reading. If, as Lichterman (1992) contends, readers ‘attribute authority to [self-help] books in ways that can not simply be deduced from content-based criticism of the genre’ (p. 422), it follows that treating the self-help book as a ‘repository of some more or less secret meaning which it is the critic’s duty to ferret out’ (Holub, 1989: 220) will miss some crucial aspects of ways actual readers make sense of the texts they choose and use.

Popularized in the 1980s, reader-oriented approaches, including small-scale reader ethnographies, typically aim to resist the ‘closed-circuit exegesis’ and ‘formalist obsession with the text’s “structural” properties’ (Chadwick, 2013: 6) that mainstream literary criticism habitually favours. Although too numerous to describe here in detail, what reader-response and -reception frameworks share is an ‘opposition to the belief that meaning inheres completely and exclusively in the . . . text’ (Tompkins, 1980: 201). Instead, they seek to ‘narratize, characterize and personify or otherwise objectify the reading experience and its conditions’, making ‘the implicit features of “reading” explicit’ (Freund, 1987: 6). Textual analysis frequently reduces a text to language, covering up ‘not only the social, or communal relations of reading, but also the sounds and voices, the material qualities of the texts’ (Messick, 1995: 188); reader-oriented approaches, on the other hand, pay close attention to the ways in which books and our engagement with them are ‘entangled in complex, culturally specific ideologies of textuality and literacy’ (p. 188). In self-help scholarship, where texts have often been ‘assumed to deliver a fixed and stable meaning’ (Grodin, 1991: 407), or whose meanings have been understood only in terms of clinical utility, an approach that explicitly recognizes the broader material, social and cultural dimensions of reading – ‘the situations in which reading takes place, how it is practiced and with whom it is shared, its physical setting, the form and feel of a book’ (Sicherman, 2007: 294) – seems not only desirable but also necessary.

A cluster of well-executed reader-reception studies has already developed a partial account of how readers exercise significant expertise to simultaneously assemble and assimilate self-help themes, ideologies and activities as they see fit. In particular, Debra Grodin (1991) describes the women readers who participated in her study of relationship manuals as ‘selective and interpretive’, hesitant to ‘swallow texts whole’ and apt to exercize ‘a sense of choice and control when they read’ (pp. 410–411); Wendy Simonds’s (1992) readers ‘did not believe everything they read’ (p. 28) and clearly distinguished between books they liked, which were typically authoritative and comforting, and books they did not, which they collectively described as ‘sensationalistic’, ‘facile’ or ‘intrusively instructive’ (pp. 28–29). Simonds (1992) indicated that her readers were likely to skim-read and to pick and choose from among suggestions, engaging critically with authors’ advice rather than accepting or rejecting it in its entirety (p. 47).

Lichterman understands this shared literacy as a ‘thin culture’ – a kind of ‘loose engagement’ that problematizes popular conceptions of audiences as either adopting or resisting cultural forms and conventions. Self-help readers, he argues, are not ‘hopelessly adrift in the cross-currents of popular psychological fashion’ (p. 433); they read books ‘believingly but loosely’ (p. 443), understanding the ‘commodified discourses’ of popular psychology as ‘discountable and attractive’ at the same time, or as ‘makeshift’ substitutes for an authority that is likewise ‘fragmented and inadequate’ (p. 442). Thin culture gives a name to the phenomenon by which otherwise atomized readers, who may or may not belong to a number of formal or more dispersed interpretive communities, are capable of developing analogous expectations, approaches and strategies for making sense of similar texts. Yet to describe these readers as ‘in the thrall’ of any particular ideology would insinuate ‘a homogeneous, cumulative “effect” of the books’ that does not ultimately manifest in everyday interactions (p. 442). In this way, thin culture offers a nuanced alternative to Stanley Fish’s (1980) more familiar concept of the interpretive community – that is, formations of readers who ‘share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions’ (p. 14). These strategies, Fish has argued, ‘exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read rather than, as is usually assumed, the other way around’ (p. 14) and they are produced either explicitly or more subtly by the various way in which readers are socialized into making sense of the texts they encounter.

In Lichterman’s (1992) own study of self-help readers, he indicates that the interpretive community ‘deserves further development for its use in understanding audiences whose interpretive work may rely more on common media experiences than on pre-existing, shared social characteristics’ (p. 425). Although he refers to acquired patterns of engagement, however, what is less obvious is the manner in which these readers may have come to develop such strikingly similar beliefs and behaviours. Assuming that consumers of self-help books are already and always both active and critical readers of texts, I suggest, neglects to address important questions about the mutable nature of readers’ experiences and the impact that other influences, including specific problems such as illness, have on their reading.

To reconstruct a detailed account of situated media use – and to give evidence for how and what interpretive strategies develop over time among readers with a history of depression – I now shift my focus to these readers themselves, drawing on key concepts that accentuate some of the in situ factors at play in the act of reading. The observations I have drawn together here are based on qualitative data I collected across a year-long period in 2016 as part of my doctoral research: a larger project exploring the emergence of depression-focused self-help books, the ways in which they are typically written and formatted, their prevalence in contemporary Western cultures, including Australia, and how readers with a history of depression tend to make sense of the books they choose and use. Following an initial online survey, which was promoted by Beyond Blue, a peak mental health organization, and which received more than 330 responses from Australian readers, I recruited 13 volunteers who participated in extended one-on-one interviews to enlarge on themes and preliminary findings from the survey – a cohort that, although relatively small, is commensurate with several other reader studies of this nature (e.g. Grodin, 1991; Lichterman, 1992). The three men and ten women were aged between 24 and 63 years, and each had previously experienced or were currently experiencing depression; eleven participants identified an Anglo Australian background, while one originally came from the United Kingdom and another, a student from Hong Kong, was living temporarily in Brisbane as an international student.

To minimize potential risk to the research participants, I sought ethical clearance through my institution’s Behavioural and Social Sciences Ethical Review Committee, who approved the project as low risk given its sustained focus on books and reading in both the survey instrument and the semi-structured interview script. Interviewees signed an informed consent document, detailing their right to withdraw from the project at any time and describing the measures I was taking to protect their data and assure their confidentiality.

I collected 24 hours of audio from the interviews, which I conducted either face to face in quiet public spaces around southeast Queensland (cafés, council libraries and university conference rooms) or via Skype. I then generated full verbatim transcripts to capture not only the participants’ observations themselves but also non-verbal cues such as false starts, pauses, hesitations and laughter, coding the data electronically for recurring narratives and themes. Each participant (whom I refer to using pseudonyms) received a transcript of their interview, which they were invited to alter if they wished. Taking an immersive, inductive and interactive approach to analysing the data, I listened to recordings several times and re-read each transcript to distinguish emerging themes, then reorganized codes to identify overarching concepts as I moved between transcripts. I also kept a research journal throughout the interviewing, transcribing and coding phases so I could record memos and reflective notes as they naturally arose.

As Grodin (1991) observes, the goal of this approach is not to ‘find lawlike relationships’ among a random, representative sample that are ‘generalizable across a population’ (p. 408) but instead, through prolonged interaction, to more carefully situate readers’ own responses within specific moments and contexts of use. Like Sarah Knudson (2013), I was motivated by the need for ‘studies of how people interact with texts and what they derive from them . . . to illuminate and explicate a much broader range of processes and motivations’ (p. 212). To these ends, therefore, I have adopted a ‘soft ethnographic’ perspective that attends to the meanings particular readers are able to attach to their experiences, not only by decoding texts but also through ‘the cultural and critical work of responding, interpreting, talking about or talking back – the whole array of sense-making practices that are proper to a given medium in its situation’ (Hartley, 1996: 58).

‘Seeing the wood for the trees’: reading selectively

Like other self-help readers, readers who experience depression choose and use self-help books selectively and strategically, typically searching for morsels of insight, inspiration and practical advice they can add to an evolving repertoire of techniques for coping. The individuals who participated in my study described a confident approach to consuming a broad array of self-help material, guided not only by the development of a kind of self-help reading ‘competency’ but also by an acute awareness of self. As one participant, a caseworker and art therapist in her 60s, explained: ‘You have to separate the wood from the trees. You have to be discerning, and it depends on what you’re looking for.’

However, even as most of these readers characterized themselves as experienced and prolific consumers of self-help books – one even shifting her computer during a Skype interview so I could see a shelf behind her filled with self-help books – they also described a reality in which, perhaps counter-intuitively, learning to approach their reading with lower expectations had resulted in more satisfying experiences over time. Uninitiated readers, they explained, may not approach self-help reading already equipped with either the assurance or the arsenal of reading strategies that individuals in reader studies typically describe, particularly if they begin reading in a vulnerable state.

In fact, even though some readers expressed a general, ongoing interest in self-help reading, most had first sought or encountered self-help books during a period of significant illness, upheaval or distress. Annie, a 53-year-old teacher aide based in regional Queensland, had turned to self-help books 16 years before when her life ‘just totally fell apart’. Monique, the art therapist from Victoria, described a period of ‘burnout’ in which she had not been able to get off the couch for more than a month. And Paul, a former accountant who had since become a vocal advocate for mental health issues in Australia, described a period in his life, several years previously, in which he had experienced severe depression to the point of attempting suicide. He explained:

After I got out of hospital, and I received all kinds of diagnoses, I kind of needed to make a choice of, well, did I want to continue living and improving, changing my life, or did I want to just give up again? And, so, that has set me on a path of discovery of as much information as I could handle and access from so many different points. And a lot of that has been through books.

In several cases, self-help reading had become an alternative or supplement for readers when other modes of treatment had proved elusive, unsatisfying or inadequate. One participant in particular – Alice, an editor from Sydney – described how she had turned to self-help books when she felt dissatisfied with the diagnosis and treatment options she had received from a health professional:

I saw a doctor . . . who told me that, given my family history, I needed to see myself as an insulin-dependent diabetic and accept that I would have to take medication for depression for the rest of my life . . . When I was coming off antidepressant medication and was really looking for another way to deal with depression, that was the time when I read the most self-help books.

Although these participants reported positive outcomes from reading self-help books over time, their initial experiences with self-help books had generally failed to provide the immediate relief they were seeking. When I asked readers what they hoped or expected to get out of reading at the time they had first turned to self-help books, they typically described wanting a ‘quick fix’ or ‘silver bullet’. Amy, a mature-aged student, commented: ‘I was feeling really sick, and I wanted something to make me better.’ Maria, a school-based counsellor, had ‘thought that there would be the answer’.

The sense of disappointment these readers recalled had seemingly arisen out of a mismatch between the instant gratification and ‘simplistic’ solutions that some self-help books promise and what they can reasonably deliver. Self-help books can appear especially attractive to some individuals, several of my participants explained, if they are reading out of desperation. Annie described herself as a voracious, and much less detached or discerning, reader of self-help books in the past: ‘I would gobble up anything. I was like a sponge. I’d take in everything. Even probably the stuff that didn’t make sense.’ A 32-year-old IT student, Archie, recalled an early phase of self-help consumption in which he had felt more receptive, even gullible, in his approach: ‘I think when I first started, I kind of accepted it at face value and just was like, “Oh, yeah, this’ll help me ‘cause it says it’ll help me!”’ And Sarah, a life coach who had migrated from England to Australia some years before, indicated that she had initially approached self-help books with high expectations as well: ‘I expected to be healed,’ she admitted. ‘It’d be like going to one of those churches where they put their hands on your head, and all of a sudden . . . It’s a miracle!’

Often, readers were not able to explain exactly why they had persisted with self-help books, aside from sheer curiosity, when their foray into reading had proved so disheartening. But as Starker (1989) wryly observes, many readers ‘seem to be quite forgiving of the genre’ (p. 171), and the individuals who participated in my study were able to pinpoint how their hopes and expectations had changed over time. Sarah, for example, described a noticeable shift in her motivations for reading:

I think my expectation of it is very different to what it was when I first started reading them: ‘I’ll read this and all will be revealed, and tomorrow I’ll wake up and not be depressed anymore.’ So, I think now, as long as I go into it with a realistic expectation of what I’m hoping to learn, then . . . that’s a good and healthy way to approach them. And I think if I just learn one thing from the book, that’s great. I’m not expecting it to give me the answer. I’m not expecting it to change my life. I’m just trying to learn something more about myself.

Lizzy, a 24-year-old pharmacy student from Hong Kong, explained that she had become more critical of self-help books since she had first started reading them in high school: ‘[I] used to be, like, hugely believe. And, like, blaming myself on not being. And now I’m like, “Let’s have a discussion and see what happen.” More like critical thinking’. In this way, for several participants, a sense of scepticism – even cynicism, in their own words – had proved a useful attitude to bring to self-help reading, rather than a liability: part of a ‘healthy’ approach that generated more satisfying interactions with authors and self-help discourse over time.

Instead of seeking answers or epiphanies, or feeling compelled to accept the premises and promises of self-help books wholesale, these readers now sought mere fragments of inspiration, wisdom or advice that they could selectively apply or adapt to their own situations, acknowledging that useful information and advice might be embedded in, or dispersed among, greater bodies of information and advice that are irrelevant, unhelpful or even harmful. Aaron, a 34-year-old reader who was currently unemployed, commented:

If you’re going to get any value from a self-help sort of book, you’re best served by just trying to take it as it is and then taking the bits and pieces that you like and applying them where necessary, without kind of going, ‘This whole thing is . . . the life-changer . . . ‘Cause, I mean, even rubbish stuff like The Secret – there’s probably stuff in there that is common sense, that you can look at it and go, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s true.’ Because it’s a whole book.

Another described this mode of reading as searching for a ‘golden thread’. In speaking about the advice she gave her daughters, Monique explained: ‘I always say to my girls, “Take a golden thread out of each book you read.” If a book can give you one little golden thread, then it’s great.’

No one book, several others pointed out, could completely solve a given problem, such as depression, or help every individual. Interestingly, interview participants were undivided in their view that self-help books could not ‘cure’ or ‘reverse’ mental illness, and they associated this type of ‘unrealistic belief’ with an ‘immature’ reading approach. Rather than condemning the books as banal or obsolete, however, they appreciated a book’s limited utility. In fact, this seemed to inform expert reading strategies that paradoxically rendered the books more meaningful and useful, a mindset that becomes more powerful ‘as competency with the genre progresses’ (Grodin, 1991: 410). Just as Lichterman (1992) described his readers ‘picking through the packaging’ of self-help books to glean a useful ‘nugget’ or two, ‘all the while adjusting their expectations down to what they think a mass-marketed book can realistically offer’ (p. 430), the experienced readers in my study had also come to regard self-help books as a stock of possibilities rather than a mere prescription. For example, Renee sought ‘new tools and strategies’, Alice said she hoped ‘to add another strategy or two to her collection’, and Archie explained that he would not read a self-help book as ‘a prescriptive sort of thing’, but to ‘just pull the information out of it as quickly as he could’. They almost unanimously understood, however, that they had learned to approach self-help books more pragmatically over time – and with effort.

‘Plugging the gaps’: reading widely

More than reading selectively, readers who experience depression also tend to read widely. These strategies emerged as closely related themes in my data, connected by readers’ frequent allusions to the idiosyncratic nature of human experience, especially experiences of mental illness, and the network of expectations and individual needs those experiences imply.

Put simply, readers recognize themselves as a differentiated audience. They described how they selected and read books that related to their personal and particular needs or problems, aligned with their belief systems and values, and appealed to their tastes and preferences. Importantly, readers did not assume that a book they had found useful, helpful or otherwise meaningful would offer another reader the same experience, and they were hesitant to make definitive value judgments about particular titles for this reason. As Amy commented: ‘You can read it, and if it works for you, great. If it doesn’t work, it just didn’t . . . Somebody else might read that book and think, “Well that was just stupid.” Whereas I love a certain book.’ When I asked Alice how she felt about the volume and variety of self-help books on the market, especially those offering conflicting advice from one another, she answered: ‘I think that’s natural, really, because different people have different experiences, so no one book is going to be right for [everyone].’

Readers are also aware that reading is a situated and mediated practice – bound by time, space and circumstance – and that the nature of their literacy (the way that they choose, understand and use self-help books) is affected by the particular circumstances of their lives. In other words, readers identify themselves as ever-changing consumers of self-help discourse, liable to shift in their engagement with texts as their experience and knowledge accumulates and they undergo personal development or change. Sarah, for example, described how one reader, going back to the same book repeatedly, could produce different readings over time:

I think we can pick up a book at one point and it will have a very different effect on us than it would a period of time later because it may well be that we’ve done extra work on ourselves, or we’ve had a new recognition or learning about ourselves – because we’re always growing and learning and perceiving things differently. . . We could read the same book every year for 10 years and get a different realisation from it each time.

Renee also suggested that ‘the teacher appears when the student is ready’. Like several other participants, she described how self-help books often seemed to ‘find’ her, when she was ready for them or the time was right. ‘Self-help books will “look” at me,’ she explained. ‘I would have picked them up years ago, and then I pick them up again today. . . I have a totally different view or respect of them. And I think that’s because I’ve changed so much, and I’ve matured, and I’ve learnt a lot more.’

In this way, readiness to read self-help books also emerged as one of the most obvious and striking themes across my interview data, which participants usually defined in terms of both emotional or psychological stability and receptiveness or willingness to read and perform the ‘work’ that self-help books prescribe. ‘It really depends on where the person is in their journey with depression,’ Sarah commented. Paul explained that ‘someone going through a major depressive episode needs to get to a level of stability first, and that’s not necessarily going to be overcome with a book’.

Even more importantly, however, readers’ narratives about self-help reading revealed that experiences of depression cannot easily be separated or disentangled from other diagnoses, circumstances or life experiences. Participants read both selectively and broadly because their experiences of depression had manifested in unique ways and contexts. They had often experienced depression either in relation to, or at the same time as, other significant stressors, such as divorce, bereavement, difficult relationships and addiction. Their consumption of self-help books, and their feelings about them, could not therefore be framed as an isolated condition, and they had read widely about grief, breaking habits, ways of understanding personality types and traits and relationships with significant others, including partners and children but also ‘toxic parents’ and ‘narcissistic colleagues’. Their reading encompassed countless frameworks, philosophies and approaches, from metacognitive therapies to yoga, transcendental meditation and art therapy.

When I asked whether a self-help book needed to relate specifically to depression to provide help or relief, most participants insisted this was not the case. While they were critical of self-help books that ignored, dismissed or downplayed depression as a serious problem, they nonetheless felt that depression could often be addressed incidentally. Paul explained that he had read a lot of books that ‘indirectly’ helped with depression – ‘because everyone’s experience of depression, the source of it, is different’. He suggested that depression was ‘just a symptom’ and that ‘it’s really the life experiences that underlie depression that are the most powerful’. Many of the books he had sought out and read had not dealt explicitly with depression but instead with a range of idiosyncratic and interrelated life experiences. ‘I’m plugging together the gaps between those life experiences and depression,’ he explained. Alice stated: ‘I think it is misguided to close boxes around people because they are experiencing a certain set of symptoms at a particular time.’ Some readers had even abandoned self-help books altogether in favour of memoir and biography, nonetheless reading with a self-help mindset.

What remained consistent, though, was their motivation to read an eclectic range of books alongside (and sometimes against) one another. Due to the unpredictable ways in which they conceptualized a common diagnosis of ‘depression’, these self-help readers assembled information, advice and stories that related to their given situations, and they developed their own ideas about depression – its causes, its manifestations, its management – that made the most sense to them. In this way, readers often come to see themselves as curators of self-help discourse, piecing together a meaningful narrative about themselves and their experiences, at times only tangentially related to what is more narrowly described as a specific cluster of symptoms.

‘Up to you’: the work of self-help reading

Unlike Lichterman’s (1992) readers, who ‘shared few concrete understandings of what goes into a “good” or “poor” [self-help] book’ and struggled to recall favourites (p. 428), most of the readers I interviewed were easily able to identify the types of books they preferred, speaking critically of ‘exploitative charlatans’ peddling ‘wishy-washy’ titles that ‘spouted gobbledygook’ or cobbled together faddish terms and concepts – ‘books that take you everywhere but take you nowhere’, as one reader commented. They were aware of a certain stigma surrounding self-help reading and happily conceded that some books deserve their poor reputation. Instead, they sought fluent, incisive and ‘responsible’ authors who ‘took their readers seriously’ and did not undermine the complexity or gravity of mental illness.

Interestingly, although they appreciated lived experience and personal insights to which they could relate, readers rejected self-help books based solely on anecdotal evidence. At the same time, even when they sought out books that had a demonstrable scientific or clinical basis, they avoided ‘purely scientific’ discourse and criticized authors who alienated the reader with an impersonal tone or bamboozled them with dense, esoteric or technical language. While several readers expressed a preference for short and simple texts that would not strain a depressed reader, they did not want or expect a simplistic message or program. In particular, they vocalized their disdain for ‘overly or overtly’ prescriptive books that eroded their sense of interpretive agency. Maria stated that she found authors off-putting when they implied ‘their suggestions are ultimately what you need’. Like several others, she made a point of denouncing ‘recipe-format’ books: ‘Do this, and you’ll get that. One plus two equals three,’ she mimicked.

Across the interview data, readers consistently recognized that self-help reading encompasses significant extra-textual effort and that, despite the ideology they convey or the ways some books are marketed, reading alone cannot always guarantee or elicit change. Just as scholars have lamented ‘[self-help] readers may think they are changing simply because they are reading the book’ (Pantalon et al., 1995: 216–217), my research participants conceded that self-help reading, in and of itself, was often not enough to bring about lasting changes. ‘You have to do the work. You have to put in what is necessary for the universe to reward you,’ Sarah insisted. Renee agreed: ‘At the end of the day, these people can come out with their theories and do whatever, but it’s up to the reader if they want to change.’ And Aaron explained, ‘That’s what self-help means. It means help yourself. The book’s helping you, but you’re still doing the lifting’.

For this reason, they were particularly wary and critical of books that promoted ‘wishful thinking’ or promised transformation without clear disclaimers of difficulty or effort, maligning titles such as The Secret by Rhonda Byrne for promoting positive thinking regimes that could saddle depressed readers with ambitious expectations about what reading a book could accomplish. Monique, for example, commented: ‘All these woo woo books, they say, “Be happy. Do this. This will change your life.” You know? It doesn’t.’

When readers recalled the most positive feelings and outcomes that they had experienced while reading self-help books, they routinely described instances of revelation (‘lightbulb’ or ‘aha’ moments), identification (‘Oh my God! That’s me!’) and legitimation (‘It’s normal to feel like that’). Sarah mentioned how reassuring it could be for readers to recognize something of themselves in a text. Monique described a sense of hope as she read: ‘This is something that can help me.’ And Renee, who liked to listen to Wayne Dyer’s audiobooks while she drove her car or did odd jobs at home, found comfort and relief in the pages of familiar self-help books. She explained: ‘I just think it’s nice to get that time alone when you’re not feeling great, and just . . . be in your own little bubble with something that’s trying to help you when you’re feeling really down.’

At the same time as they reported a range of positive experiences, readers also divulged a range of more troubling and unpleasant feelings: disappointment, fear, confusion and anger. These feelings stemmed primarily from recognizing that depression can dramatically impede an individual’s ability to engage positively with self-help books, some readers pointing out that the demands of reading might even prove too onerous for people currently experiencing debilitating symptoms. Self-help reading is inherently different from other forms of reading, participants repeatedly said – rigorous, non-immersive and often covert. They routinely defined it in opposition to reading for pleasure, with Lizzy observing, ‘You kind of need a lot of cognitive power to actually process [texts], or to actually do what they’re trying to ask you to do. And if I don’t have therapy or medication, I probably won’t be able to do that.’ In a similar vein, Monique indicated that self-help books were more suitable for readers when they were at least beginning to recover from depression. ‘When you’re depressed,’ she observed, ‘you don’t really feel like reading. I think coming out of it, that’s when you read.’

Conveying similar concerns to clinicians and scholars of media and culture, then, some participants sensed that self-help books could actually do more harm than good. They described particular times when they either could not engage with the books on a direct, material level, or they were not yet ‘stable’ enough to be able to understand, accept or implement potentially useful ideas and techniques. With few exceptions, they felt that pharmaceutical and face-to-face therapy represented the most appropriate interventions for acute or major depression, turning to self-help books and other modalities only when they felt ready. Some even went so far as to suggest that depressed readers should not read self-help books because they were more likely than others to experience a sense of failure when they found them difficult to read, could not perform the activities that the books required or did not experience immediate or tangible relief from uncomfortable or distressing thoughts, feelings and sensations. Monique, who had not only experienced depression herself but also worked with individuals grappling with mental health problems, was particularly vocal about the pitfalls of reading self-help books in a vulnerable state: ‘Some people who are not feeling good about themselves might feel more of a failure. And if it doesn’t work, that’s when people go down the gurgler.’

The text–reader encounter: conclusions and directions for further study

Prevailing research frameworks have taken the reading of ‘self-help’ literally, assuming that a meaningful text–reader encounter will be a perceptibly helpful one and that innate ‘helping’ power lies within the text itself. In clinical research, this supposed power manifests as therapeutic efficacy – that is, individuals who read self-help books end up feeling better. In content analyses, it is lived out within a convoluted ideological system that ultimately undermines the user – that is, individuals who read self-help books end up feeling worse. When clinicians praise the efficacy of the self-help book, however, and social commentators malign its long-term effects, they tend to assume an axiomatic, hierarchical relationship between text and reader that real-world encounters often subvert. Distinguishing between self-help books themselves and the ways in which specific users read them ‘empowers us to question whether the significance of the act of reading itself might, under some conditions, contradict, undercut or qualify the significance of producing a particular kind of story’ (Radway, 1991: 210). Put differently, if we remember that self-help books must be read and that reading is something real people undertake in a given social context, we must also interpret the meanings or effects of those texts with caution: perhaps self-help books, by the very nature of their reading, ‘are neither as powerful as their proponents and producers would claim, nor as disempowering or destructive as their social and psychological critics would argue’ (Whelan, 2004: 314).

Reporting on data collected from a broader study, this paper has endeavoured to address this lingering tension by exploring some of the ways that individuals with a history of depression choose and use self-help books. In particular, I asked readers to reflect on the ways they have approached their reading over time, to describe how these texts operate in their daily lives and to consider how reading has figured in their experiences of depression – what it means, in other words, for readers who share a common diagnosis, and perhaps cognate interpretive strategies, to ‘make sense’ of the self-help books they encounter over time. With remarkable consistency, they described a distinctly pragmatic approach to negotiating a genre equally maligned and celebrated for its therapeutic potential. Reconstructing the ideological and instrumental dimensions of this reading foremost in terms of a strategic engagement, they narrativized their reading as characteristically broad, selective and generative – what we could otherwise call ‘a conscious expression of control’ (Grodin, 1991: 410).

Although others have observed that ‘authors and cultural authorities set goals for readers, but readers do not necessarily comply’ (Sicherman, 2007: 294) and that self-help books ‘may function in ways that have little to do with their actual efficacy as tools of therapy’ (Dolby, 2005: 36), considering the behaviours of individuals who choose and use self-help books brings this reality into particularly sharp relief. Instead of characterizing their reading as the sort of acquiescence or close compliance that scholars invoke and self-help books may themselves demand (e.g. Coyle and Grodin, 1993), readers described some of the ways in which they minimized or actively resisted the totalizing efforts of the texts they encountered. In picking up a self-help book, one participant explained, readers hold the balance of power: they can put it back down again. And readers often do. Few books strike them as wholly or inherently meaningful. Rather than deeming them meaningless, however, readers are able to make books meaningful under certain conditions and through a range of interpretive processes.

Among these, expectations and experiences play a crucial role – especially prior experiences with self-help books and ongoing experiences of mental illness. Reading does not work the same for everyone, all the time, but mature readers typically share what they call, in their own terms, ‘realistic expectations’ of what a useful encounter with a self-help book entails. Even avid or habitual readers usually read with detachment and discrimination, viewing individual works not as absolute authorities but a reservoir of possibilities. From this ‘ad hoc forum for personal life’ (Lichterman, 1992: 440), they fossick for titbits of insight and practical knowledge that can help them contextualize their experiences and face problems with renewed understanding and hope. In this way, readers often describe their motive for reading as a form of persistent intellectual curiosity: apart from reading in response to catalytic life events, they simply want to know more. But they seek moments of connection, comfort and reassurance, too – a sense that they are not alone; a sense that their thoughts, feelings and sensations are valid; a sense that remedy or relief may yet be possible.

In light of previous reader-oriented research, both within and beyond the domain of popular psychology, the discovery that readers with a history of depression also read selectively and strategically may not come as a revelation or even much of a surprise. This account diverges, however, in its heightened sensitivity to the instability of this type of competence or expertise. While scholars have emphasized the active reader who is authoritative yet ambivalent in their approach to reading self-help, readers who are currently experiencing depression or have had few previous encounters with self-help books often cannot engage purposefully with therapeutic discourse – perhaps when they most want to.

If we identify self-help reading as a mode of active audience participation, therefore, we must also recognize that it is both a learned and contingent mode. A concept such as thin culture – as a working model of ‘reader–book relations’ (Lichterman, 1992: 423) – may accurately describe a practice characterized by openness, tentativeness and ‘making do’, but it fails to capture the more volatile and unsatisfying ways that readers engage with texts at times, and why they may do so.

By reflecting on their experiences, readers themselves identify patterns of evolving engagement reliant not only upon diverse life experiences and a ‘self’ who is destined to change over time (even from day to day or reading to reading), but also upon readiness for and repeated interactions with particular textual forms. Even though they may eventually come to share certain ways of selecting and operating on self-help books, it seems that individuals who choose and use these texts usually read outside of conventional social formations and must learn independently how to engage meaningfully with popular psychology in print format. In a roundabout way, rather than emanating from established interpretive communities, these strategies appear to precede, inform and sustain them – a finding that speaks to the porous boundaries and mutually constituting relationships that develop between genres and their audiences.

‘Perhaps it is because we rarely attempt to examine the act of reading – or the social construction of that act – that we rarely recognize it as an activity at all,’ Simonds (1992) has pointed out (p. 26). There is still more to be learned and written about self-help readers as a particular kind of interpretive community or active audience; however, this paper accentuates the rich potential of ethnographic approaches in the study of popular psychology texts and the readerships that coagulate around them. By exploring how readers approach the self-help genre in response to a common problem – in this case depression – and resisting the urge to ‘debunk’ their experiences, practitioners from across disparate fields may be better able to understand the demands of self-help reading and how this reading may unfold over time. In many cases, self-readers articulate the same concerns that scholars do, but their openness to the books and the seemingly predictable ways in which their literacy matures with repeated interaction indicates that books can and do help, regardless of their objective ‘quality’, because readers allow them to.

This paper also serves to reinvigorate ongoing research that might achieve a more sophisticated level of granular data. In particular, it would be beneficial to engage a larger cohort of readers with a history of depression – or, indeed, another common diagnosis – and interesting to compare individual readers’ responses at various stages in their reading journeys and in light of more detailed demographic characteristics beyond age, sex, occupation and cultural background. It is likewise worth noting that, despite their long-standing entanglements with American culture, self-help books are readily available in English-speaking countries around the world, and they encompass an increasingly diverse yet universal agglomeration of problems and approaches. Although I interviewed readers either from or currently residing in Australia, they rarely commented on the contemporary self-help phenomenon as quintessentially American, nor did their responses reveal any explicitly ‘Australian’ character, a discovery or oversight that deserves some more sustained and rigorous investigation.

Even so, the continuity of these themes with those that have arisen from similar study designs, which experienced a dramatic peak and then decline in the early 1990s, suggests the ongoing salience of ethnographic approaches to investigating self-help reading and the scope to develop more nuanced understandings. Well into the 21st century, when depression remains a significant global health concern and the self-help market continues to thrive, centring the voices of readers themselves offers a necessary and promising avenue to further interrogate the cultural, commercial and clinical significance of an activity whose limited presence in the literature belies its enduring ubiquity and dynamism.