A survey by the Learning and Skills Council last year found that 16% of teenagers believed they would become famous, probably by appearing on a show like Big Brother (with or without the racism sideshow thrown in). This was deemed a better bet than obtaining qualifications despite the fact that the odds of success in this strategy are several million to one, but then you would need the qualifications in the first place to work that out. So Oliver James must be right then when he points the finger of blame at a society responsible for "dangling a false promise of the possibility of happiness."
At about the same time Fisher Price launched the latest must have material possession for all budding capitalist infants - the iTod, aimed at under threes. Add to that the new 24 hour American TV channel targeting children as young as 6 months old; that by the age of 4, 30% of them will have televisions (or the electronic babysitter in Sue Palmer's terminology) in their own bedrooms; that prams are now being designed to be fitted with computer screens and the fact that 1 in 10 girls between the ages of 12-14 already covet cosmetic surgery. Then all of a sudden his arguments about the Affluenza-promoting cultural imperialism spawned in the Land of the Free afflicting the younger generations are looking rather peachy.
According to James, selfish capitalism is the source of the Affluenza virus compelling us to confuse what we want with what we need and we have become obsessed with measuring ourselves and others through the distorted lens of Affluenza values. And it is all driving us mad, responsible for a quarter of the population suffering mental illness and more than 1 in 10 of children rapidly heading the same way. So far he's really on to something this James wonk. But then it all goes horribly pear shaped.
Surprise surprise it all started in 1979 - Thatcherism transmogrified into Blatcherism. Privatisation and the private sector forcing greed and incompetence on an unsuspecting public. Apparently inequality in wealth is inextricably linked to the surge in mental illness. All we must do is stop worshipping at the altar of Thatcherism/Blatcherism/soon to be Bratcherism; splurge out more cash benefits to those on below average incomes; "go back to being British and stop being American" as he states in an earlier diatribe; sell off central government's largest asset geographically - Ministry of Defence land; nationalise a few estate agents on the way and get on the first carbon neutral powered, no frills coracle to Denmark. It's easy!
Why stop at Denmark? Surely North Korea ticks most of the Elysian boxes. Without all those wicked capitalist pressures all those malnourished junior comrades should be dancing in the state swept streets in mentally balanced ecstasy.
But hold on a minute. Money is the source of all evil and here he is planning a massive giveaway of the filthy stuff, thereby contaminating those worse off even more. Privatisation, we are told, was one of the original cardinal sins. Yet flogging off MOD land, no doubt to greedy developers intent on concreting over Salisbury Plain with even more aspirationally unaffordable duplexes, would be the biggest bonanza to date. And sailing into that Danish Valhalla, isn't it Denmark that has one of the worst rates of alcoholism and suicide in Europe and more than twice as many children in care as the UK? And as for that good old back to British basics, didn't that bicycling spinster peddle on the way to the chimneyed pub for a warm beer back in the 1990's?
But what are a few diametrically contradictory social premises between Guardian-brandishing sons and daughters of the revolution when the quarry is a Prime Minister who last graced the Dispatch Box more than 16 year ago?
Richard Layard, for whom I have tremendous admiration in putting mental illness on the economically relevant and politically respectable map, makes a perfectly good case for treating the spread of mental illness with talking therapies, in particular Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. He is right of course. The economic pay-back, not to mention the personal well-being dividend of getting thousands of sufferers back on their feet and making a positive contribution to society is compelling and must be pursued urgently.
But that is to deal with the symptom, not the cause. Undoubtedly much of this country's mental ills are caused, or at least promoted by financial injustices and material hankering. However, to say it all is would inaccurately assume that mental illness is much more a preserve of those in deprivation when in fact it is manifesting itself particularly aggressively amongst the middle classes.
Money is only a part of our nation's poor mental health not the root of it, the unequal distribution of it even less. David Cameron has quite rightly signalled the importance of work/life balance and of tilting the balance back from economy friendly families to family friendly economies.Many progressive companies, even Oliver James' "wicked" privatised ones, are acknowledging the commercial logic of investing in a happy and therefore more productive, stable and dedicated workforce. This is where the politics of wellbeing can propagate in the most fertile ground.
But there is another side to all this and that is where I began, with our children and young people. Are we helping the mental health of our children when we are pushing them through the sausage machine of "schoolification" at an ever younger age - more testing, more formalised learning and mini-curricula even into nursery school? What next, SATS test for embryos?
Children in Scandinavia do not start formal schooling until the age of seven yet within two years they have overtaken the literacy and numeracy skills of their British peers. Whatever happened to letting children grow up organically into well rounded and socially interactive members of society, learning through play and the great outdoors? Should we be using the tax and credit system to force more parents back to work earlier when they might prefer to nurture their own children in those crucial early years when they develop the all-important attachments?
When the side effects include the proliferation of quick serve processed foods high in additives and obesity inducing calories, the near extinction of family meal times and a third of children deprived of a parent reading to them at bedtime, whose interests are really at stake? Whose mental health is benefiting from the explosion in binge drinking and the proliferation of soft and hard drugs. Why do we hardly raise an eyebrow when we read reports of 10 year olds arrested for dealing in cocaine? Is putting 3,300 children in jail helping their mental health in the long term? Is it helping that educational bodies that have the ear of the Department of Education deter teachers from teaching teenagers the difference between right and wrong in our schools, thereby removing those boundaries which children need to test to define their rites of passage journey from childhood into adulthood?
And when it all goes wrong, are we helping by doling out the chemical cosh - 50,000 children on anti-depressants, some of them as young as six? The most depressing finding in the Children's Society Good Childhood Inquiry was that one third of teenagers responded that their lives lacked a sense of purpose. It is increasingly easy to see why many should think that and money is only a small part of it. And there's lots more along these lines in the recent UNICEF report on child wellbeing.
Ironically Oliver James's book is pretty depressing. We can justifiably accuse him of contributing to the malaise that he has helpfully identified, even if he has wrongly over-diagnosed the causes as financial. What we can agree on is that it is a question of when, not if, the Conservatives form the next government and the wellbeing of families, the environment and well-hugged hoodies take centre stage courtesy of David Cameron.
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