Product Description

In the bestselling "Affluenza", world-renowned psychologist Oliver James introduced us to a modern-day virus sweeping through the English-speaking world. He met those suffering from it and demonstrated how their obsessive, envious tendencies made them twice as prone to depression, anxiety and addictions than people in other developed nations. Now "The Selfish Capitalist" provides more detailed substantiation for the claims made in "Affluenza". It looks deeper into the origins of the virus and outlines the political, economic and social climate in which it has grown.James points out that, since the seventies, the rich have got much, much richer, yet the average person's wage has not increased at all. A rallying cry to the Government to reduce our levels of distress by adopting a form of unselfish capitalism, this hard-hitting and thought-provoking work tells us why our personal well-being must take precedence over the wealth of a tiny minority if we are to cure ourselves of this disease.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #138226 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-18
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

About the Author
Oliver James trained and practised as a child clinical psychologist and, since 1987, has worked as a writer, journalist and television documentary producer and presenter. His books include Juvenile Violence in a Winner-Loser Culture, the bestselling They F*** You Up and Britain on the Couch, which was also a successful documentary series for Channel 4.

Customer Reviews

Who makes us mentally ill?
Another dull book from Mr James. The central thesis is that advanced capitalism, with its emphasis on keeping up with the Joneses, makes us mentally ill. Snippets of data from this or that study (much is made of the WHO report on mental health) are sketchily introduced to give the impression that this is a serious academic work; it definitively isn't.

Some argue that the perception of the increase in mental disorders is due to the burgeoning of the psychiatry profession and its incessant message that we are all need their services. These days, shyness isn't just shyness; it is social anxiety or avoidant personality disorder, afflictions said to trouble millions. Emotions and states of mind that were considered normal twenty years ago are now diagnosed as pathologies.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the bible of psychiatrists, has been transformed from the slim handbook it was up until the 1980s into a chunky tome, with hundreds of new, poorly specified and poorly researched syndromes. The descriptions of many `disorders' are so generalised and so catch-all that, indeed, it would be possible to say that all or most people are mentally ill at various stages of their lives. The tragedy of trying to increase the market of consumers of therapy (psychotherapy is a lucrative business and like any business it cannot stay still or it will go under. It needs to find new markets or sell more services to the same market) is that those who truly are in need and suffer from *real* emotional or behavioural disorders, are left out in the cold and don't get the help they need.

Mr James has additional reasons for continuing to preach his trite message that we are all in need of psychotherapy. He is deeply imbedded with the psychoanalytic movement (psychodynamic psychotherapy) in the UK, albeit as a `lay' member. Such movement, however, is holding on by its fingertips in the competitive business of psychotherapy. It needs all the help it can get to spread its message; including the services of a mediocre populariser. No wonder Mr James keeps repeating that CBT doesn't work!

For alternative views on the lucrative and not particularly healthy world of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, you may want to read the following books (they are not more biased than Oliver James's "work").

Christopher Lane,
Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness.

Frank Furedi
Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age

Anna Sands
Falling for Therapy: Psychotherapy from a Client's Point of View

Frederick Crews
Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays

Tana Dineen
Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People

Anti-Capitalist rant masquerading as a serious argument
The dust jacket says the book provides `more detailed substantiation' for the claims about materialism being a contributing cause of mental illness, made in Affluenza (James' previous book, which raised the possible link, but was criticized for being light on evidence).

But this is one of the worst books I've ever read all the way through. It's a rant by an unreconstructed 1970's socialist about the evils of Thatcherism/ Reagonomics/ Neoliberalism (together `Selfish Capitalism') and US foreign policy and New Labour, masquerading as a serious argument.

James distinguishes between `survival materialism' (desire for the basic necessities) which he says does not lead to mental illness and `relative materialism' (keeping up with the Joneses) which he says has led to longer working hours, poorer parenting (as parents spend less time with their young children), increased stress, weaker relationships, greater inequality of income and wealth - all in turn leading to an epidemic of mental illness, principally in those countries that have embraced selfish capitalism (US, UK, Australia, some ex-communist countries); in contrast, the more paternalist European and more egalitarian Scandinavian countries and Japan have not seen a similar rise in mental illness (chiefly depression).

The best part of the book is the last 3 pages of chapter 3, where James identifies a number of other factors correlated with mental illness, which may be more important causes of the mental illness epidemic:

* Levels of collectivism vs individualism
* Economic inequality
* Anomie and alienation
* Levels of absent fathers.

A deceitful book
This book is not different from all the previous writings in Mr James' repertoire; it argues that, manipulated and goaded by the marketing industry, we confuse wants with needs.

It could be said that our strange attraction to the ever expanding self-help and psycho-bubble industry (which includes psychodynamic psychotherapy, incidentally) together with increased levels of disposable income, cause growing preoccupation about how happy or unhappy we are and how much more in touch with our inner child/feelings we could be if only the message of the latest guru could resonate more with us. What is this, if not another manifestation of the `me', `me', `me', selfishness and self absorption that Oliver James condemns?

This kind of writing is part of the problem (of an increasingly atomised society) not part of the solution.