Self-help is no help — that’s useful knowledge

Few books in the self-help section will ever turn your life around, writes Suzanne Harrington. Real personal development requires far more time and often, professional help

Want to Realise The Amazing Person Inside Yourself? Change Your Life In 3 days? Lose A Stone By The Weekend? Heal Your Inner Child and Unleash Your Creativity Before Teatime?

Sorry. It’s that time of year. Although for the US$11 billion self help industry, it’s always that time of year. I should confess that for me the term ‘self-help’ is an anagram of ‘snake oil’; but this is only because I regularly see too many otherwise-sane friends seeking spiritual truth and inner contentment via the ersatz wisdom of so many cloying you-go-girl charlatans and plastic gurus.