'Affluenza'

Mental Health Awareness Week is keeping my mind concentrated on what is being said about what seems to amount to an epidemic of mental illness.
It seems that buying ever more stuff, as we are constantly encouraged to do, isn’t all it’s made out to be and can leave us feeling anything but happy.

The psychologist and writer Oliver James travelled the world for nine months interviewing the wealthy elite who might be considered to ‘have it all’ but found them often far from happy and suffering from a condition he called ‘Affluenza.’  He said that: ‘The competitive drive for money, status and power results in a profound deformation of the human soul. We end up treating ourselves and others as commodities, as mere means to vacuous ends. Our capacity to form authentic, loving relationships, to feel secure and balanced, is destroyed...’

But it’s not only the super-rich who are prone to ‘Affluenza’. A growing number of people are beginning to question whether excessive material consumption above a certain level of material well-being, isn't really making them happy.  International studies have found that:

• Extra income is not contributing dramatically to the quality of people’s lives - income growth in developed countries over recent decades has led to no significant increases in subject well-being.
• Happiness peaked in the 1950’s in the US.
• In 2011 an International Monetary Fund study showed no correlation between happiness and a country’s wealth, with Indonesia coming out top of a list of respondents saying they were very happy.
• It seems it’s not the amount of money we have that will make us happy but rather how the wealth is divided between us: The more equal a society, the happier it tends to be.

It seems that there is currently an epidemic of ‘affluenza’ throughout the world - an obsessive, envious, keeping-up-with the Joneses - that has resulted in huge increases in depression and anxiety among millions.