Disclaimer / TL;DR: This got out of hand. Too much time on my hands that I didn't have, today. Anyway.

The gist is: yes, there's crap in "self-help", but it's the current name for "the practical, applied branch of philosophy", i.e. methods and principles to live well, to cope, to grow, to grieve, to become. A rather ancient human tradition... There's no other name for that, as we speak. I don't think it's helpful nor relevant to blanket-judge an entire domain in such strong terms.

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[Long version]

Wait, what?

What an impeccable way to grossly reduce an entire aspect of life —becoming, getting 'better', knowing oneself— to just about the shallowest, most commercial tip of the iceberg.

But then, how shall we call the "better methods"? See, there's a tension in vocabulary here that I'm not sure one perceives when criticizing "self-help" (been there myself, before I learned better).

Philosophy at the turn of the 20th century became a purely abstract object of academic study (doing away almost completely with the millennial tradition of "philosophy as life recipes, simple practices and principles to live well and better cope with things"). The real-world / "applied" branch of philosophy has now been excised the confines of universities and professors, and has been termed "self-help". Most people no longer know (forgotten recently, a century ago) that philosophy had forever been practical first and foremost, theoretical maybe as a distant secondary / academic concern; also that it was actually taught and practiced by every day people (life was harsher, and admittedly required a little bit more psycho-maintenance given the brutality of both nature and men). Montaigne, things like that. But we somehow took offense at the apparent "simplicity" or "narrow-mindedness" of simple, "common sense" maxims and principles — the 20th century was to be positively analytical to a fault, or it wouldn't be.

Self-help, what little actual widespread practice remains of ancestral philosophy today, is just a word. Just like putting spiritual or sci-fi terms on the same concepts doesn't in any way change their value (or lack thereof).

So self-help literally designates "the oldest, practical branch of philosophy" (as opposed to the theoretical studies taught for the obtention of degrees: see the rift between a random student working to get some 3-year degree and get on to journalism or politics or whatever versus someone— you, me —facing trials in life, searching for the deeper answers inside themselves...) Theory for the student seeking good grades, but a much more "physical" experience for all of us eventually.

Self-help as we find it today is quite literally the remnants of a battle-tested accumulation of thousands of years of learning to "deal with it" (in the very words of e.g. Ancient Stoics). If you read texts from 2,500 years ago or today's good flavor of the month, the similarities are striking — people remain people and that doesn't change at all in less than 10 or 100,000 years.

So if you mean that the good parts of "methods" should be called philosophy I agree, but again the term has now long been confiscated by academia (and to think philosophy is not science, it shouldn't be gated as such). Thus the term has become a turn-down for most people (like they perceive e.g. math: too abstract, analytical, boring, and absolutely not "educating" or "self-elevating" in any useful sense of the term unless it's for your job).

2,500 years since Pythagoras and Aristotle and here we are, by all accounts not much better at educating children and adults alike (just many more, that is a victory in economic terms). But I digress.

So we're left with "self-help". It's an umbrella word, an alley name for stores, who cares that there's poop in-between diamonds in there — the former's existence doesn't make the latter any less valuable. Actually, diamonds grow in poop at the end of the day — maybe some books are great precisely because the author was appalled like you today and me yesterday, and perhaps what stands between you and me today is just the read of one such 'great' book, profound enough to change you like great philosophy does¹.

I mean, not all programming books and courses are great either, and yet... we doubled the developer population every N months for 70 years quite steadily... 'Perfect' can sometimes be the enemy of 'good', especially on hard problems like the general becoming of human beings.

The problem we face is that any 'general' account of 'how to live well' must go through so many fields (some sciences, some not really, some cultural...) that it's virtually impossible to find a good name without emphasizing one too much over the rest — psycho-something, philo-stuff, evolutionary biology (i.e. social theory of information aka genes and behaviors), etc.

I see your problem, but I don't see a solution — change the name and the iceberg will follow, like the xkcd on standards. Gate it behind a "scientific" framework and suddenly half your objects are AWOL, N/A, no can do. Great to publish as a scholar but you just lost 99% of the effectiveness generally — as Joseph Campbell showed us so eloquently, culture matters to the making of mature beings.

Besides, there's this truth: the only one who will ever really "see" you is you. "Looking inside" is an exercise that only ever has one subject-object in life, your own self, and no one else, not in nor out. "Self-help", or "self-whatever", is a rather straightforward way to convey the idea: only you can help yourself.

In many ways, the word is much closer to its object than ‘philosophy’ ever was as an ontology².

Note that I personally opted to say "self-growth" for myself, partly inspired by this very book, and to differentiate my general synthesis from the trash you decry; but you should know also that I chose a different term precisely to avoid having to defend the value of my "principles" (by having to explain association by name with otherwise trashy content). Do you see the conundrum here? What good I found is hard to share because of the stigma perpetuated by such views/comments as yours, because the source is somehow lesser. But the blanket judgment is no more valid than saying "all Americans are..." or "all women are..."

The real trick is to brucelee through life: “take the best, leave the rest”. If one only intends to learn from Shakespeare-Plato level of execution, a lot will be missed. Most notably everything that science will not or cannot consider as an object for good reasons, that might yet "work" for you. The dirty (I think wonderful) secret in philosophy as in medicine is that a good two thirds of positive results are placebo effects. The art is about becoming a master writer of such effects for oneself —which requires intricate knowledge of the subject. In that sense, even bad books teach you about yourself — that's when anything external ceases to be an excuse but becomes a welcome obstacle, a worthy trial, XP to gain if you will.

As for blue-pill / red-ill, I don't have the faintest idea how it's related to this topic. I haven't looked for years at what these people are saying, but the core take-away³ applied to a rather limited subset of philosophy; so sure learning about RP/BP dynamics is part of self-growth⁴, but it's like hard drives vs computers, different level of objects.

Sorry for a long, but hopefully informative, rambling / post.

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[1]: If I had to pick one, I personally recommend Stephen Covey's famous "7 habits" — as one of the best philosophy manuscripts I've ever read, it's just as good as the best Hellenist/Roman stuff.

[2]: Ontology = how linguists call a "namespace". (not the other meaning, related to metaphysical philo-stuff blabla). Notice that "philo sophia" (the love or pursuit of wisdom) is the general goal / process, whereas "self help" ("help yourself and the sky will help you") is already embedding a practical lesson in its very name: knowing the name is already enough to spread this one idea. It's very powerful, I think, sociologically.

[3]: That we should teach and learn "purple pill" or some higher-third way, not that you would hear it much but really it's the synthesis of this whole 'movement' IMHO.

[4]: My advice: skip RP/BP and move directly to evolutionary biology. The Moral Animal by R. Wright is a fantastic book.