A lot of smart business types are turning, these days, to the self-help industry as a source of easy money.

They say there’s a mug born a minute.

Certainly there’s no shortage of suckers willing to hand over their dollars if you promise them radiant wellness, fame, wealth and never-ending up-beat thoughts.

In the USA, the self-help industry is said to rake in about $19 billion per year.

The punters seem not to notice that to have a “self-help coach” is a contradiction in terms. If you can help yourself you don’t need a coach. If you need a coach, you’re incapable of helping yourself. Ho hum.

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A particularly disgusting example is so-called “alternative medicine”.

While emptying sick people’s pockets, these sweetie-pies tell them to stay away from orthodox medical help and to invest in herbs, dietary fads, manipulations or whatever.

By the time they notice they are being led up the garden path, the patient’s cancer or whatever has become untreatable.

Even some so-called orthodox medicine borders on quackery.

Our anti-depression pills, counselling etc. are basically tinsel, denial, delaying tactics and a refusal to confront the real cause of our misery.

The modern secular world’s attitudes to suffering and to what constitutes happiness is so wrong . . . .

Everybody is going to suffer. Yet we don’t teach children how to suffer — or that suffering has meaning and purpose.

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Before psychologists were invented, people went to Confession — acknowledging their sins to God through his representative, the priest – from whom they received forgiveness in God’s name, plus a penance (punishment) to carry out. 

At the end of which, the sins were finished with.  God had forgotten about them.  The sinner was free to forget about them too. 

Something real had happened.  The world was different place.

Doubtless some relief can result from conventional psychological methods.  But there’s nothing definitive about it.

Once a cancer is cured you can throw away the Band-aid.