THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF SELF-HELP THERAPY MATERIALS

Self-help therapy books, cassettes, and other materials are often antiscientific and shoddy, but they also frequently have several solid advantages, help some people to make profound personality changes (with and without regular therapy), and may well effectively influence many more people in the US. (and even more so throughout the world) than do professional psychotherapists. It would be preferable if self-help materials were pretested and posttested in a manner similar to that of researching the reliability and validity of psychological tests.