Picture this: a 'spiritual retreat' in Arizona. Dozens of people crammed into a blisteringly hot 'sweat lodge' – the Native American version of a sauna. Some people start to faint, vomit, cry. By the end of the 'rebirthing experience', three people are dead, 18 in hospital. They each paid around €7,000 for the privilege. This was the work of James Ray, a self-help guru whose 'vision quest' course in the desert ended on 8 October. Ray, a favourite of Oprah, Larry King, and one of several such gurus who appeared in the film The Secret, is a big player in the human race's current biggest waste of time, the self-help movement.

The deaths are being treated as homicides, and Ray is understood not to be cooperating with authorities, preferring instead to post his thoughts on the event on Facebook and on his website. His reaction was to skip out of his makeshift 'spiritual retreat', and subsequently hold a conference call with some of the victims along with a 'channeler' who said that the reason the three people died was that, after having an out-of-body experience they had "so much fun" that they decided not to come back. As the blog Gawker put it, "Could you even invent a more tasteless line of reasoning for the future Law & Order episode this is clearly about to become?" So with three dead and 18 hospitalised, can we finally, please call self-help's decades of bluff?

The continuing breakdown of traditional religious structures in Western society has created fractures and chasms where alternative spirituality movements sprout like fungi. We have so much time on our hands, and are so disillusioned with who we are, where we are going, and how we can grasp any sort of happiness that we are willing to buy the most incredulous tosh in case it works. Movements come and go, but the desire for contentment is the one constant, along with those who promise to give it to you – waxy white guys with unmoveable Colgate smiles, who talk about channelling, searching, grasping, finding your inner something or other.

The recent blockbuster in self-help is, of course, The Secret, a film and book by Australian TV writer Rhonda Byrne, and in which our friend James Ray features. The Secret is not a secret at all. Millions of copies (of both the book and DVD), appearances on Oprah, seminars, and other career-launching offshoots for its patchwork of participants can be summed up as: if you want some thing enough, you'll get it. But for some reason, this rehashing of the laws of attraction struck a chord with Americans and Europeans (namely women in their 30s and 40s, lost in a society that doesn't seem to have a distinct place for them without a husband or babies) and its popularity – even among intelligent people – is astounding.

I have no problem with someone deciding to go Buddhist and setting up a year-round camp in Glastonbury immersed in the Angulimaliya Sutra, or hanging out in Lough Derg, looking at the stars and contemplating what's next, but generally, the adaptation of these modern hawkers of 'spirituality' tend to coincide with you handing over a lot of money, be it for a book, a DVD, a course, a talk or a seminar. The people behind this movement practice the ultimate form of self-help. They help themselves. To your wallet.

One of the key figures in the self-help movement who must be held accountable is the de facto Queen of America, Oprah Winfrey, who parades people such as and including Ray on a far-too-frequent basis. Winfrey's own personal insecurities and struggles have been projected onto her audience who gulp up her cock-and-bull personal-growth solutions like starved sealions at a fish market. You're talking about the kind of audience that practically turn inside out with excitement when Oprah offers them free slippers from Walmart, so you can imagine the delirium that takes hold when all-out fulfilment is up for grabs.

Nothing is policed or monitored, yet these charismatic egomaniacs are allowed to play God – surely their ultimate goal – with people's lives. Tomorrow, I could start calling myself Una Chakra and set up the Leinster School of Enlightenment (if it doesn't already exist), with a six-week course, Channel Your Inner Leprechaun, specialising in envisaging your destiny as a rainbow, finding your path to gold, realising the power of the little person inside you, and so on. Actually, that almost sounds believable, which goes to show the amount of muck we've been swallowing.

An interest in self-help accelerates the 'self' towards the most paralysing states of humanity and other 'selves': self-indulgence, self-importance, selfishness, self-obsession. We could do without those selves. We could do without this Oprahfication of belief structures and this flat-pack approach to instant happiness. Contentment is a lifelong course and is not a selfish pursuit. And no DVD or sweat lodge or item on a breakfast TV programme is going to give you that.

umullally@tribune.ie