Are you feeling frustrated? Listless? Despondent? If the answer is ‘yes’, it’s possible that you have contracted the affluenza virus.

Affluenza is the subject (and title) of the psychologist Oliver James’s new book, which charts the ills of modern, ‘Western’ culture. It’s defined on the cover as ‘a contagious, middle-class virus causing depression, anxiety, addiction and ennui’.

It’s not a new disease. You can detect the symptoms in Ecclesiastes’ lament, ‘Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.’ What is new is how prevalent it’s become.

According to James, we have never been so depressed. ‘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.’

What should we do? James offers two avenues of response: personal and political. His political prescriptions are naive and disappointing, but the personal ones often transcend the banality that plagues self-help manuals. Many of them also sound strangely familiar:

Don’t be motivated solely by the praise of others. Be grateful for what you have. Cultivate authenticity. Spend time and energy nurturing your children. Value relationships over things. Review your life as you would if you had a terminal illness.

Perhaps most interestingly, James observes that the most authentic, vivacious and playful people he met in the course of his research – people he describes as holding ‘the full house of desirable Being’ – were those who had suffered. Suffering, he accepts, can destroy lives, but it can also transform them into something altogether more human.

James is no apologist for Christianity and he says nothing about the way his advice on combatting affluenza resonates with traditional Christian attitudes and disciplines. But he does acknowledge that ‘wherever I went I found that religion seems to be a powerful vaccine … Much to the consternation of social scientists, on average regular churchgoers suffer less depression or unhappiness than unbelievers.’

We are mistaken if we seek happiness from the Christian faith. But if, instead, we are searching for ‘the full house of desirable Being’ – and are willing to listen to some uncomfortable and counterintuitive answers – we may yet find what (or who) we are looking for.

Nick Spencer