Like the civil rights movement, the self-help tradition played a major role in shaping our national psyche, becoming as American as apple pie and Oprah, says Matthew Archibald, an Emory University assistant professor of sociology. His decade of research on the self-help phenomena has resulted in his recently published book, "The Evolution of Self-Help: How a Health Movement Became an Institution" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2007).
"Self-help is about self-actualization and seeing your condition differently by confronting it," says Archibald, who studies health movements and health care organizations. "We're an upstart society that became a world power by constantly reinventing ourselves."
A group of U.S. veterans who lost limbs in battle formed one of the first documented self-help groups in 1919, a forerunner of the movement called the Society for the Wooden Leg. Archibald says the movement really took off in 1935 when two struggling alcoholics in New York launched Alcoholics Anonymous Ð the first national group and the granddaddy of modern-day self-help.
By the 1950s, he says, a shift in attitudes toward the mentally handicapped spurred parents of children with disabilities like Downs Syndrome to start support groups, as they sought ways to care for their children outside of institutions.
During the freewheeling 1960s, self-help exploded as addictions came out of the closet and groups formed "for everything you could think of," Archibald says. Later, confessional talk-show hosts like Phil Donahue and the queen of self-help, Oprah Winfrey, made it okay to air your most embarrassing flaws on national TV, which Archibald says further ingrained the self-help ethos into mainstream consciousness.
Today the movement is accepted Ð and even encouraged Ð by the medical establishment. Archibald's research turned up 589 self-help groups for chronic mental or physical conditions that have national chapters, but he admits that the number is debatable, depending on how you define self-help. The national chapters serve as umbrellas for thousands of local branches, making it even harder to quantify, he adds.
Scientific research on the effectiveness of self-help groups remains ambiguous, he says, adding: "I think it's really good for groups of people facing adversity to challenge institutions of power and help keep them honest."
Emory University (www.emory.edu) is one of the nation's leading private research universities and a member of the Association of American Universities. Known for its demanding academics, outstanding undergraduate college of arts and sciences, highly ranked professional schools and state-of-the-art research facilities, Emory is ranked as one of the country's top 20 national universities by U.S. News & World Report. In addition to its nine schools, the university encompasses The Carter Center, Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Emory Healthcare, the state's largest and most comprehensive health care system.