Here comes the self-help revolution in mental health

A massive, systemic, and yet largely silent revolution is occurring in mental health today and is gathering steam for tomorrow: self-help efforts without professional intervention. The self-help revolution traverses multiple disciplines and entails diverse activities: changing behavior by oneself, reading and applying self-help books, attending support and 12-step groups, watching movies and incorporating their cinematic lessons, surfing the Internet for advice and treatment, and ingesting herbal medications without medical supervision. These and additional examples all point to people making concerted efforts to change themselves on their own. In some ways, the self-help movement merely represents a continuation of the timeless human quest to understand and conquer behavioral disorders. In ancient Greece, early Africa, and colonial America, people relied on self-change. But in more fundamental ways, the self-help revolution in mental health is relatively recent and qualitatively different. The numbers, in this case anyway, do not lie. Consider the following representative statistics attesting to the surge of self-help. More than 70% of Americans suffering from a diagnosable behavioral or mental disorder will never receive specialized mental health care and instead will grapple with the disorder on their own and with the support of others (Kessler et al., 1994; president's Commission on Mental Health, 1978). Forty-two percent of American adults currently use alternative therapies, up from 34% just 7 years ago (Eisenberg et al., 1998). Worldwide, an estimated 80% of individuals use herbal medicines; in the United States, last year an estimated 7.5 million individuals tried St. John's Wort to combat depression and 10.8 million tried Ginkgo biloba to enhance memory (Greenwald, 1998). Fully 5% of American adults attended a self-help group in the past year (Eisenberg et al., 1998). Two-thirds of all Internet users have sought healthcare information there (Nickelson, 1999), and we cannot even begin to quantify the burgeoning reliance on the Internet to access information and advice. A steady diet of self-help books appears at the estimated rate of 2,000 per year (Rosen, 1993), and they routinely occupy prominent places on the best-seller lists. They are written on every conceivable self-help topic, as the following list of self-help titles vividly demonstrates: Dance naked in your living room How to juggle women without getting killed or going broke I lost 600 pounds: I can sun help you lose 30 Change your underwear, change your life Dated Jekyll, married Hyde Boldly live as you have never lived before: Life lessons from star Trtk Asshole no more: A self-help guide for recovering assholes and their victims The Fairy Godmother's guide to dating and mating Celestial 911-Call with your right brain for answers In this article, I will briefly trace the reasons for this self-help revolution and, more urgently, argue for organized psychology's vital involvement in it.