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Self-help or self-improvement is a self-directed improvement of oneself—economically, physically, intellectually, or emotionally—often with a substantial psychological basis. When engaged in self-help, people often use publicly available information, or support groups—on the Internet as well as in person—in which people in similar situations work together. From early examples in pro se legal practice and home-spun advice, the connotations of the word have spread and often apply particularly to education, business, exercise, psychology, and psychotherapy, as commonly distributed through the popular genre of self-help books. According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, potential benefits of self-help groups that professionals may not be able to provide include friendship, emotional support, experiential knowledge, identity, meaningful roles, and a sense of belonging. Many different self-help group programs exist, each with its own focus, techniques, associated beliefs, proponents, and in some cases leaders. Concepts and terms originating in self-help culture and Twelve-Step culture, such as recovery, dysfunctional families, and codependency have become integrated into mainstream language.: 188  Self-help groups associated with health conditions may consist of patients and caregivers. As well as featuring long-time members sharing experiences, these health groups can become support groups and clearinghouses for educational material. Those who help themselves by learning and identifying health problems can be said to exemplify self-help, while self-help groups can be seen more as peer-to-peer or mutual-support groups. History In classical antiquity, Hesiod's Works and Days "opens with moral remonstrances, hammered home in every way that Hesiod can think of.": 94  The Stoics offered ethical advice "on the notion of eudaimonia—of well-being, welfare, flourishing.": 371  The Discourses of Epictetus can be read as a sort of early self-help advice column, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius as the journal of someone engaged on a deliberate self-help program. The genre of mirror-of-princes writing, which has a long history in Greco-Roman and Western Renaissance literature, represents a secular cognate of Biblical wisdom literature. Proverbs from many periods, collected and uncollected, embody traditional moral and practical advice of diverse cultures. The hyphenated compound word "self-help" often appeared in the 1800s in a legal context, referring to the doctrine that a party in a dispute has the right to use lawful means on their initiative to remedy a wrong. Some consider the self-help movement to have been inaugurated by George Combe's Constitution (1828), from the way that it advocated personal responsibility and the possibility of naturally sanctioned self-improvement through education or proper self-control. In 1841, an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, entitled Compensation, was published suggesting "every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults" and "acquire habits of self-help" as "our strength grows out of our weakness." Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) published the first explicitly "self-help" book, titled Self-Help, in 1859. Its opening sentence: "Heaven helps those who help themselves", provides a variation of "God helps them that help themselves", the oft-quoted maxim that had also appeared previously in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack (1733–1758). Early 20th century In 1902, James Allen published As a Man Thinketh, which proceeds from the conviction that "a man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts." Noble thoughts, the book maintains, make for a noble person, while lowly thoughts make for a miserable person. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (1937) described the use of repeated positive thoughts to attract happiness and wealth by tapping into an "Infinite Intelligence".: 62  In 1936, Dale Carnegie further developed the genre with How to Win Friends and Influence People.: 63  Having failed in several careers, Carnegie became fascinated with success and its link to self-confidence, and his books have since sold over 50 million copies. The market Group and corporate attempts to help people help themselves have created a self-help marketplace, with Large Group Awareness Trainings (LGATs) and psychotherapy systems represented. These offer more-or-less prepackaged solutions to instruct people seeking their betterment, just as "the literature of self-improvement directs the reader to familiar frameworks... what the French fin de siècle social theorist Gabriel Tarde called 'the grooves of borrowed thought'.": 160–62  A subgenre of self-help book series exists, such as the for Dummies guides and The Complete Idiot's Guide to..., that are varieties of how-to books. Statistics At the start of the 21st century, "the self-improvement industry, inclusive of books, seminars, audio and video products, and personal coaching, [was] said to constitute a 2.48-billion dollars-a-year industry": 11  in the United States alone. By 2006, research firm Marketdata estimated the "self-improvement" market in the U.S. as worth more than US$9 billion—including infomercials, mail-order catalogs, holistic institutes, books, audio cassettes, motivation-speaker seminars, the personal coaching market, and weight-loss and stress-management programs. Market data projected that the total market size would grow to over US$11 billion by 2008. In 2013 Kathryn Schulz examined "an $11 billion industry". Self-help and professional service delivery Self-help and mutual-help are very different from—though they may complement—aid by professionals. Conflicts can and do arise on that interface, however, with some professionals considering that, for example, "the twelve-step approach encourages a kind of contemporary version of 19th-century amateurism or enthusiasm in which self-examination and very general social observations are enough to draw rather large conclusions." Research The rise of self-help culture led to boundary disputes with other approaches and disciplines. Some would object to their classification as "self-help" literature, as with "Deborah Tannen's denial of the self-help role of her books" to maintain her academic credibility, aware of the danger that "writing a book that becomes a popular success...all but ensures that one's work will lose its long-term legitimacy.": 195 & 245  Placebo effects can never be wholly discounted. Careful studies of "the power of subliminal self-help tapes... showed that their content had no real effect... But that's not what the participants thought.": 264  "If they thought they'd listened to a self-esteem tape (even though half the labels were wrong), they felt that their self-esteem had gone up. No wonder people keep buying subliminal tapes: even though the tapes don't work, people think they do.": 265  Much of the self-help industry may be thought of as part of the "skin trades. Peopl.... 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