This review, published as it is towards the end of a long, wet British winter, will find many readers labouring under or emerging from a cold. Some will be feeling weak and listless, others rundown and exhausted. The worst may be experiencing a sense of desperation and emptiness that even a copy Third Way cannot dispel.

If these symptoms persist through the spring, you should perhaps consider consulting a clinical psychologist; Oliver James, for example. You may have contracted the affluenza virus.

Affluenza is the name and subject of James’ third book charting the ills of modern ‘Western’ culture. It is defined on the front cover as ‘a contagious, middle-class virus causing depression, anxiety, addiction and ennui.’ Although it has many proximate causes, it is, at root, the result of our dysfunctional relationship with money.

The book charts a psychologist’s tour of eight countries: UK, US, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, China, Singapore, and Russia. James interviews around 240 people, psycho-analysing the extent to which affluenza is shaping (and wrecking) their minds and lives. To this often interesting but ultimately overlong and not wholly convincing body of evidence, James adds numerous, more persuasive surveys and statistics detailing levels of national depression, anxiety, emotional distress, family breakdown, eating disorders, medication, etc.

Ultimately, although his friendly, journalistic style will not convince sceptics, the evidence he provides is too much to ignore. We really do have a problem. ‘To fill the emptiness and loneliness, and to replace our need for authentic, intimate relationships, we resort to the consumption that is essential for economic growth and profits. The more anxious or depressed we are, the more we must consume, and the more we consume, the more disturbed we become.’ We have mistaken the poison for the cure, and the result promises to be a slow, painful death.

The book’s strength lies in its analysis of the problem, which is well-captured by the witty and memorable title. Its weakness lies in the (lack of) analysis of root causes, which too can be linked to the title.

Affluenza is a brilliant (if not original) metaphor for what ails high-income counties today. It is, however, only a metaphor and forgetting this, as James sometimes seems to, leads you into a dualism that clouds rather than clarifies the issue. If affluenza really is a virus, there would be little you could do to protect yourself from it. There might be some vaccines – the word that James uses throughout to describe the self-help style advice he offers readers – but ultimately, whether you contract the virus and how badly it affects you would be beyond your power. The real fault lies elsewhere.

For James this is ‘Selfish Capitalism’ and everything that involves: income inequality, a ‘wealthy elite’, government, the tabloid press, ‘economics’, the US, and, most seriously, advertising and marketing in all their various ghastly forms.

There is undoubtedly much truth in what he says. Advertising is often hyperbolic, misleading and mendacious. The tabloid press can be inimical to a nuanced, rounded and balanced view of reality. Income inequality is surely at least correlated with emotional anxiety, especially in a society that has confused price and value so badly.

But is it really true to say that advertisers are intent on promoting consumption ‘through purveying lies’? Does government really shape the educational system in order to create good little consumers and producers? Are ‘English-speaking nations [really] designed to maximise the profits of a tiny minority of very rich people, [and] not the citizens’ well-being or, for that matter the survival of the planet’? Time and again James comes a little too close to conspiracy theorising to be persuasive.

His silent Manichaeism also affects his analysis of the solutions. The countries he most admires are Denmark and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand. These have socio-economic systems and/ or national cultures that, to a greater degree, manage to hold affluenza at bay, draining the swamp of the ‘marketing society’ in which the virus breeds.

There is, however, no real analysis of why these countries exhibit and can sustain these systems whilst others can or do not. There is no sense that character, economics or politics is in any way the accumulation of millions of individual moral choices that everyday people make every day. There is, in short, none of G.K. Chesterton’s sense that ‘I am’ what is wrong with the world.

This is odd because the self-help bits of the book are nothing like as trite or hackneyed as self-help notoriously is. James can be refreshingly specific (‘Scale down your interest in people you have never met’) and blunt (‘Stop reading women’s magazines! They are the devil’s work!’). He is perfectly alert to the fact that if affluenza has a cure, it must be at least as much through personal as political efforts. But he never thinks through the implications of this and thus can write ‘democracy [is now] the right to vote for people who would make you richer and better able to pleasure yourself’ without exploring who is to blame for this. Perhaps it is not simply private equity firms, peerage-purchasing political operators, and marketing gurus in their air-conditioned lairs. Perhaps it is me.

Affluenza: How to Be Successful and Stay Sane by Oliver James is published by Vermillion

This review first appeared in Third Way.