An English psychologist is trying to find a vaccine against the 'affluenza virus' - a contagious infection that robs people of emotional stability in exchange for a materialistic lifestyle, writes Sylvia Thompson
English psychologist Oliver James has discovered a new virus that permeates every aspect of many people's lives today.
Defined as the "affluenza virus", he describes it as a set of values which increases our vulnerability to emotional distress. Quite simply, he says, "it entails placing a high value on acquiring money and possessions, looking good in the eyes of others and wanting to be famous".
Sound familiar? The problem is that, according to James, the virus (as he calls it), which originated in the West, is spreading fast around the globe. In his new book, Affluenza(Vermilion), James travels from Shanghai to Singapore, Auckland to New York and Copenhagen to Moscow interviewing people who have caught the bug.
And on his journey, he finds variations of the problem and searches for clues as to how we can inoculate ourselves against it.
If this all sounds facetious, think again because at the end of the book, James offers some radical but, some would say, profoundly important changes we need to make to prevent the further spread of affluenza to future generations.
Unfortunately for Irish readers, his travels don't take him to Ireland but ask any GP, counsellor or psychotherapist working in boom town Ireland and they will quickly draw many of the same links between consumerism, raising children, property fever, the battle of the sexes, rising rates of depression, anxiety and addictions.
"These values are not new but what is new is that we have become absolutely obsessed with measuring ourselves and others through the distorted lens of affluenza values," writes James.
"The great majority of people in English-speaking nations now define their lives through earnings, possessions, appearances and celebrity, and those things are making them miserable because they impede the meeting of our fundamental needs."
Psychologists agree that we have four basic needs - the need to feel secure (emotionally and materially); the need to feel part of a community; the need to give and receive from family, neighbours and friends; and the need to feel competent, effective, autonomous and authentic.
While some may argue that to fulfil all these needs is indeed the work of a lifetime, James contends that by placing higher value on acquiring money and possessions and looking good in the eyes of others, we are actively working against what we truly need.
He argues beyond the personal and suggests that a particular type of political economy which he calls selfish capitalism (he is not against capitalism per se) has caused an "epidemic of the affluenza virus".
Selfish capitalism, he says, has four leading characteristics. "The success of business is judged almost exclusively by its current share price; there is a strong drive to privatise public utilities such as water, gas or electricity; businesses are regulated as little as possible; and there is a widely held conviction that consumption and market forces can meet human needs of almost every kind," he says.
"In a developed nation, rates of emotional distress [ disturbances such as depression, anxiety and substance abuse] increase in direct proportion to the degree of income inequality," says James.
In the tradition of some of his predecessors (particularly American psychologist Erich Fromm who he quotes regularly), James believes that "most emotional distress is best understood as a rational response to sick societies".
James believes that people are resorting to over-consumption "to fill the emptiness and loneliness, and to replace our need for authentic, intimate relationships".
"The more anxious or depressed we are, the more we must consume, and the more we consume, the more disturbed we become . . . Compensation for personal misery is why people with [ these values] are at greater risk of substance abuse [ alcohol, illegal drugs], shopaholia, workaholia, sex and the other compulsions of mass consumption," he says. "We medicate our misery through buying things."
During the research for his book, James interviewed 240 people, many of them working full-time in high-powered careers and others studying or choosing to contain their work.
Either overtly or covertly, the interviewees (a New York stockbroker, a Shanghai student, an Australian property developer, a psychiatrist and a Copenhagen journalist) talk about how levels of anxiety, unhappiness, loneliness, fear of failure and depression seep through the lives of many people they know.
The evidence is anecdotal but the stories are potent and James peppers them with his own psychological insights into people's motivations.
As a member of the Happiness Forum in Britain and one of the many people Conservative Party leader David Cameron has asked for input into social policy, James is a bit of a celebrity psychologist himself. In the book, he speaks about his own middle class background and how he only married in his 40s and recently became a father, giving him a very keen sense of the struggles of contemporary parenting.
"Affluenza virus infection is extremely harmful to the wellbeing of mothers. It impels them and their partners to buy property they can't afford, creating a perpetual sense of impoverishment and putting them under pressure to work, whilst their children are small," says James.
"It encourages them to regard only paid work as a source of self-esteem . . . Above all, it makes them and their society downgrade the huge importance of caring for small children - almost everywhere I went, the role of the mother had a status somewhat lower than that of street-sweeper.
"If that were not bad enough, it has also impeded the emergence of a greater participation of men in 'motherhood'. If men were to feel as responsible for the care of babies and toddlers, our lives would be transformed."
And so to his conclusions. Psychologist that he is, James first suggests we sort out our own personal issues first and even advocates some types of psychotherapy over others (psychodynamic in preference to cognitive behavioural). Then, he boldly suggests we "reject much of the status quo" and aim to find "intrinsic value" in what we do - be that full-time work, part-time work, looking after our children or whatever.
He also encourages men to take a long, hard look at their lives and ask themselves whether they would like to do some or all of the mothering.
In the last few pages of his book, James presents readers with his so-called unselfish capitalist manifesto.
Firstly, he says, parents should have the option of one of them to receive the national average wage while they give up work to care for any children under the age of three.
"My point is that we need to restore the status of caring for children, and in a society where only paid work is valued, paying parents to care for their own youngsters is the best way to achieve that."
Secondly, he advocates a higher taxation system for the very well-off and regulations so that senior managers do not earn more than five times the national average. He also suggests that we need leaders who are emotionally mature.
"At present, the system is strongly biased in favour of the workaholic, the chameleon, the Machiavellian, the marketing character and sufferers from certain personality disorders," he says.
As we approach a general election, one wonders what our current political leaders would have to say about that . . .