Research Digest Blog has an excellent post titled “CBT-based self-help books can do more harm than good.” We do focus on the value of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for those in need of certain types of help. We also get asked about suggestions for self help books and are given many recommendations. My response is to be mostly reluctant about giving self help book suggestions or taking recommendations.

I think the work of dealing with our emotions and changing our behaviors is in the living, not the reading. There is no one book or formula that is going to make the kind of difference we seek. How many times do we talk to people who are on this neverending quest to find the next big self help book, only to keep repeating the same mistakes and staying stuck in the same place. We do obviously value books and reading, but more as a process of discovery, engaging research, opinions, and the stories of others. We are not finding easy answers in the books we read and recommend. Instead, the information we find calls for more questions, involves greater complexity and a deeper understanding of how life is filled with mystery. It is living without easy answers and with what we don’t know that interests us. In the end it is you, not a book, that has the answers. Here is an excerpt:

Self-help books based on the traditional principles of CBT, including popular titles like ‘CBT for Dummies’, can do more harm than good, according to a new study. The risks were highest for readers described as ‘high ruminators’ – those who spend time mulling over the likely causes and consequence of their negative moods.

The new research focuses on the use of self-help books as a preventative intervention for people at risk of developing depression. Gerald Haeffel identified 72 undergrads at risk and allocated each of them randomly to work through one of three self-help books. A third of the students spent four weeks working through a traditional self-help CBT-based book, of the kind typically found in book stores, which involved learning the links between thoughts, behaviour and mood, as well as identifying negative thoughts and re-evaluating them. Another group of students followed a ‘non-traditional’ CBT-based self-help book, similar to the first but modified so that the task of identifying and challenging one’s own negative thoughts was removed. The final group followed a book that taught academic skills such as time-management and memory aids.

Here’s the bottom line: among students who tended to ruminate and who had suffered an increase in stress, those who followed the traditional CBT book displayed more depressive symptoms after the four-week study period than those who followed either of the other two books. At four-month follow-up, the traditional CBT study group as a whole tended to have more depression symptoms than the other groups, although high ruminating and stressed students in the traditional group remained the biggest losers.

(Find the image above here.)