… Apart from enabling a basic level of economic success, sufficient to pay for food, health and education, the purpose of government is to minimise the amount of mental illness by creating a benign society, like the Scandinavians have been doing for 70 years. Blatcherism has done the opposite. If you can face it, here’s a glimpse of what really happened to our social psychology in the past 10 years, starting at the beginning of life.
Foetuses depend on having calm, happy mothers. There is abundant evidence that feeling stressed in the last trimester is an independent cause of hyperactivity and behaviour problems. The mother’s high levels of cortisol – the fight-flight hormone – are passed through the placenta and continue to affect the child nine years later. Yet, since 1997, women have been more, not less, likely to work right up to the birth.
It just goes on from there, as if the New Labour control freaks are oblivious to the evidence of what makes for mental health. Caesareans have multiplied several-fold, even though they interfere with bonding. British babies are even less likely to be breastfed than anywhere in Europe, again reducing emotional intimacy. Then, mental illness-inducing strict routines for babies, like insistence on four-hourly feeding or imposed sleep schedules, have become widespread. Where is the government action, following the damning study of this method published last year? It shows that, compared with babies raised in infant-centred regimes (for example, demand-feeding or sharing the parental bed when distressed), at three months the routine-nurtured babies spend 50 per cent more time crying or fussing: the Discontented Little Baby. …
Oliver James, The Independent 13 May 2007
Affluenza: How to be successful and stay sane, by Oliver James
At the core of this book are some sharply stated truths. Beyond a certain level of material wealth, more does not equate to happiness; indeed, the pursuit of more is positively pathological.
Where this pursuit is accompanied by increasing inequality and economic insecurity, the results are even more dire.
Add to this the ever more insidious power of advertising, the new electronic circus of celebrity culture, and the workaholism of unregulated economies, and we are, as we know, in big trouble.
Oliver James argues that the spread of the US model of capitalism is responsible for the epidemic of emotional distress that has swept across the developed world, and is threatening to engulf the new China and Russia, among others.
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. Anomie, alienation and addiction await us. …
David Goldblatt, The Independent 16 February 2007
Related:
http://www.theecologist.org/pages/archive_detail.asp?content_id=2005
