SELF-HELP IS 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.

For more than a generation, the Self-Help and Actualisation Movement — felicitously enough, the words form the acronym Sham — has been talking out of both sides of its mouth, promising relief from all that ails you while promoting nostrums that almost guarantee nothing will change (unless it gets worse).

Along the way, Sham has filled the bank accounts of a slickly packaged breed of false prophets, including, but by no means limited to, high-profile authors, motivational speakers, self-styled group counsellors, “life coaches” and any number of wise-men-without-portfolio who have promised to deliver some level of enhanced contentment. For a fat fee.

Between 2000 and 2004 the market for self-improvement in the US grew by 50 per cent. Today, it is an industry that grosses $8.56 billion (£4.8 billion) annually. And what has America got in return for its investment?

The self-help movement is not a wholesale failure. Here and there a marriage is saved, a parenting dilemma solved, a mental-health problem identified and corrected. Here and there. But mostly, Sham does not do what it promises. To date, the industry has escaped intense scrutiny because even those who doubt its effectiveness regard self-help as a silly but benign pursuit, an innocuous vice that plays to the Jerry Springer set.

The sinister secret of Sham’s success is that everyone underestimates it. Self-help is seldom recognised for what it is: a contributing factor (at a minimum) to many of the problems now plaguing society. Whether or not you follow self-help’s teachings, you have been touched by it, because Sham’s effects extend beyond the millions of consumers who pre-order Dr Phil McGraw’s latest book.

The alleged philosophies at the core of the movement have bled over into almost every area of social conduct: the home, the workplace, the educational system, the mating dance. Corporations spend billions each year on Sham speakers, boot camps, wilderness outings and similar programmes; they incorporate Sham beliefs into office protocols, mandating “enlightened” policies that add cost, offer no documented benefit and may even work as disincentives for quality, productivity and morale.

Sham rhetoric has infected healthcare, too, spawning an aggressive new wing of alternative medicine that moves people away from proven mainstream treatments by persuading them that they can cure themselves through willpower.

What brought it all into focus for me was a career move in mid-2000. For 16 months, I served as editor of the books programme associated with Men’s Health, part of the Rodale publishing empire. The company had become, through its ingenious mail-order programme, the premier independent book publisher in the US. The company conceived and sold millions of self-help books each year. Thus my experience there gave me a bird’s-eye view of the inner workings of the self-help industry.

One piece of information to emerge from the company’s market surveys stood out: the most likely customer for a book on any given topic was someone who had bought a similar tome within the past 18 months.

That finding should not have surprised me. People read what interests them. But the 18-month rule struck me as counterintuitive — and discomforting — in a self-help setting. Many of our books proposed to solve, or ameliorate, a problem. If they worked, one would expect lives to improve. One would not expect people to need further help — at least not in that same problem area, and not time and again.

In reality, our marketing meetings made clear that we counted on our faithful core of malcontents. One of my Rodale mentors illustrated the concept by citing our then bestselling book, Sex: A Man’s Guide. The primary audience for the book weren’t Casanovas determined to polish their bedroom skills. Our buyers were more likely to be losers at love, hapless fumblers for whom our books conjured a fantasy world in which they’d imagine themselves as ladies’ men. Failure and stagnation, thus, were central to our business model.

Failure and stagnation are central to all of Sham. The self-help guru has a compelling interest in not helping people. He has a potent incentive to play his most loyal customers for suckers. Even if you’ve never turned a page of a self-help tome or heard a word of wisdom from a self-improvement deacon, your life has been affected by Sham and its canons. There is too much of it in the environment: on TV, in magazines, in dialogue of the latest Bridget Jones film or some other blockbuster.