Established 2005 Registered Charity No. 1110656

Scottish Charity Register No. SC043760

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Intro to SOSH

October 01 2025
Me in the mirror. © Mat Amp Me in the mirror. © Mat Amp

Why we need to replace self-help with helping each other. By Mat Amp

For reasons I won’t go into right now, I haven’t been feeling myself recently, whatever the fuck that is. Maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to write.

I sit at the keyboard and stare at the screen, but words just don’t follow. Anyways, a few days ago something happened that seems to have shaken things loose a little bit.

The short version is this: I went round to see a friend who hasn’t been too well of late. A well-meaning mutual friend of ours, who is known to over-indulge the nose candy, had bought my friend a gift which was as ill-fitting as a ‘70s school uniform. My friend is one of those people that has a spectacularly advanced sense of humour and so a self-help book written by a smug and entitled middle-class princess was in itself pretty laughable.

And laugh is exactly what we have done.

My immediate reaction was to deface it with a bic biro. Which is how this journey started – a journey that seems to have taken us to the invention of an entirely new type of therapy. It’s called SoSH.

SoSH stands for Shitting on Self-Help, and after several days of immersive therapy, I am able to report back that there are very real signs of positive progress and even some personal development.

For one, I seem to be able to write again. But it’s way more than that. Plastering demented angry slogans on the pages of this utterly banal drivel seems to have improved my mood no end. I mean, this book is so damn bad, I genuinely find it difficult to accept that a commercial enterprise has deemed it fit for publication.

I could talk all day about the awful assumptions this woman makes, but I’ll give you a quick example, so you know what I’m talking about. At one point she writes about the fact that we’ve all probably been a little bit rebellious in response to the boundaries inevitably put in place by our parents. It’s written in a way that doesn’t so much as acknowledge the existence of people brought up by parents who may have done something other than lay out neat little boundaries to work within. So, is she saying that the victims of abuse aren’t worth mentioning or is she, perhaps, saying that they are beyond self-help?

And this isn’t me grinding some personal axe. While I have plenty from my young life to be sad about, my parents were more than okay. I grew up in a loving, nuclear family that did give me boundaries. I just find it so insulting that someone would pitch a self-help book that totally ignores the existence of those people who didn’t.

My response, apparently, to this type of smuggery is anger. Don’t worry, I’m old and ugly enough to be pretty close friends with anger. And so, my reaction has not been to rage but to laugh and errr… get my bic out.

I can’t even start to print in this article what I’ve written in the pages of this book, and I probably shouldn’t tell you the title, but I can say that it’s been a lotta fun desecrating its pages.  

The therapy finishes when I leave the book on the tube for someone to read. Of course, I will never get the joy of seeing someone’s reaction to picking up and reading our SoSH bible, but my imagination is more than capable in that respect.

I think it’s the smug assumptions and privilege that really get under my skin. And to be blunt, I’d rather we help each other than help myself.

Helping ourselves, in my humble opinion, is everything wrong with the world. I mean look at the way commercial interests and politicians devise new and seemingly legal ways to get fat at our expense.

Just take a look at the ways our elected Members of Parliament behave right now. This is something that I really wasn’t aware of until someone pointed it out very recently: MPs earn more from second jobs and donations than they do from their bloated paychecks.

MPs defend themselves by saying that everything is legal and above board, but this is my entire point. It seems to be legal these days for private companies, vested interests and those we elect, to stick their greedy snouts into the trough of riches created by our consumer bucks.
Gina Millar in the Guardian writes:          

“Twenty-four MPs have accepted donations from a little-known broadband company, IX Wireless, many of them based in constituencies in the north of England, where the company builds its networks and has been involved in planning disputes. How is it right that MPs are still free to receive money from lobbyists and second jobs?”

While it is legal, it is all day wrong and meanwhile the committee set up to oversee these types of payments is a toothless piece of crap with F-all power to do anything.

And the risk of corruption is not the only upsetting aspect of this fiscal piggery. I mean, where are these A-holes getting the time to work on second jobs when they’re paid, handsomely, to run the country?

Perhaps we should be happy they’re spending less time running the country, though, because they do such an awful fucking job when they do.

Laws that have been passed by MPs to protect gamblers are used by greedy betting companies to find dubious reasons not to pay out on big winners. Legislation designed to protect children from adult content on the web means we have to give our log-in details to third parties, who are selling those details to hackers, who then use them to sign in to our protected online accounts. MPs haven’t got a clue what they’re doing and any sense of public responsibility or social conscience are long-gone. In fact, I think we’ve all been duped into believing that honesty is a weakness in our leaders because we want them to rob, cheat and steal on our behalf.

How else do you explain the fact that the leader of the free world is a giant narcissistic baby who wouldn’t know the truth if it was tattooed on a leg of beef that was used to club him round his wobbly jowls.

Anyway, if you’re tired of it all perhaps try SoSH. It has worked for me, perhaps it can work for you?

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October – November 2025 : Making a difference

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