Won't buy any well-being or self help books

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I've never really bothered to buy a book on how to help myself with mental well-being, I'll look at them but I won't waste my money on something I'm only going to look at a few times and then never look at it again.

The self-help industrial complex does exist for the purpose of making money.

for instance,

https://bettermarketing.pub/15-ways-100 ... 274139c653
Jan 27, 2020
11 min read
15 Ways 100 Self-Help Gurus Deliver Value and Make Money
A statistical analysis of the big names in the self-improvement industry and how they succeed

and

https://brandminds.com/the-self-improve ... n-by-2022/
Brand Minds Blog
The Self-Improvement Industry Is Estimated to Grow to $13.2 billion by 2022
By Iulia-Cristina Uță
Thursday / June 27 / 2019

Self-help is written for average Neurotypicals and it won't take away your autism.

If there are specific things you'd like to work on, you can find help for free on YouTube, TedX, etc.
Try searching for autistic or otherwise neurodivergent speakers.

What a fantastic commitment to lifelong learning and self improvement you're displaying!

Just saying. There's a lot of beneficial knowledge in all sorts of self help books from mental health to financial to spiritual or physical fitness etc etc. Ignorance isn't actually bliss.. can be a ton of frustration that could be alleviated by learning new things and then doing things differently. Countless successful people in many different disciplines read a variety of self help books.. I know, because I make a point of looking at peoples' bookshelves when in their homes and I've been in hundreds and hundreds of homes. People in well to do neighbourhoods with money, health, fitness and so forth tend to read titles like these while miserable people in poor areas might have a couple twilight novels on the shelf if they bother to read books at all.

I'm not much of a reader. If I'm not immediately grabbed by the opening paragraphs of a book it just feels like being back at school with homework.

The book that most helped me was one by RD Laing who proclaimed that "Insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world". Can't remember now which one in particular, I read a few, but the message I got from it was that it was better to just go out of my mind and come out of the other side and learn the lessons from that experience rather than trust any professional organisation or treatment.

"There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain."

That's what libraries are for

Self-help books will never help me. Nor will suicide help lines, crisis help lines, or anything with the word "help" in them. Can you get stop the pandemic? Can you make humans live in peaceful co-existence? Can you stop the politicians from being filthy lying idiots? Can you make society stop seeing aspies as freaks, cringelords or serial killers that absolutely must be cured of their "disease" and help them live normal, healthy lives? Can you stop global warming? Then you can't help me at all.

You think all I have to do is take some pills or practice deep breathing until I forget all those horrors? Then you obviously don't know me at all. I feel bad because the world is bad, and humans are bad. If humans and the world stopped being bad, then I'd feel better. But it's not going to happen, so I'll feel bad for the rest of my life. The End.

Some of the responses in this thread suck.

I've read quite a few self help books. A couple about metal health, some about physical fitness and nutrition, quite a few about positive mindsets and the power of positive thinking type stuff, several about personal finance, business success, sales, work ethic, skills building, masculinity, trauma, addictions etc etc etc and each and every one of them has been valuable, well worth the read and lessons learned.

It's quite strange to me that people would poo-poo an entire genre of books that has been created over literally hundreds of years in order to share knowledge of how to do & be better, live happier healthier lives of abundance with clearer more positive thinking minds, stronger bodies, better skills, strategies to achieve goals of all kinds and so on and and so on.

I think I still have a stack of self help books I bought over the years I haven't read yet, but recently bought myself another new one - David Goggins' "Can't Hurt Me," as it's supposed to be incredibly motivational. Bought one of my Godson's a copy for Christmas, too. We'll both read it and discuss.

The responses suck proportional to the level to which the self help books sucked.

"Well you should have picked better ones"

I read the ones paid professionals such as teachers, psychologists, voc rehab counselors, suggested, or in one case outright gave.

There is only one of me, my body is defective, and I also had to keep house and make a living, which meant I didn't have the amount of available hours for reading which the unemployed do; which college students who skip some classes to read do; and which negligent parents do; so there was neither TIME nor Physical Ability to read dozens of, even a dozen, self help books in order to discover the "Good" ones.

And adding to the condemning attitude toward self help material are things like last year when a certain disability support group sent out almost monthly emails which went like;

"Here's this new self-help material for such and such a specific thing and it is COMPLETELY FREE!! !
All you have to do to receive it is register on this 3rd party mailing list."

Umm, NO.

If receiving it is conditional upon my giving you something of value, such as my online identity, and sometimes zip code too, then you are lying through your stinking teeth about it being "free".

As one may have already deduced I no longer associate with that outfit.

The self help industrial complex has stained itself, tainted itself, poisoned itself, in both my view and the views of people who are not me.

And that now connects and dredges up from memory the frustrated paid professional who finally blurted out,
"And its going to keep not working for you until you decide to stop having autism!"

Oh?

Really?

I can change the physiology of my brain by merely deciding that it is changed?

What a fascinating worldview.

If you need help selecting some great titles there are several ways to optimize your reading list. You could ask for recommendations here, check out the staff picks at book stores, check the star ratings and reviews on amazon, or more simply just check out the titles that have sold Millions and Millions or Tens of Millions of copies over the years - chances are if the book has been in print for quite some time and sells Millions upon Millions of copies that a lot of people have found it valuable, recommended it to others, and that's why it sells so well so is probably a good bet. No reason to just randomly select titles and hope for the best when there are quite a few proven winners out there.