Britain on the Couch [antikvár]

Preface: What This Book Is About This book is about the angst of normal people, of people hke us. It offers an explanation of why we are so much more likely to be miserable than our grandparents, why we are so discontented and self-attacking (Tm fat, I'm stupid, I'm ugly', when you are not), why we feel our hves are not under our control, why the moments of emotional richness and freedom of our childhood are less frequent, why so many of us feel there is 'something missing' from our Hfe. It estabHshes that compared with 1950, there is an epidemic of irritabiUty and aggression, of depression and paranoia, of obsessions, panics, addictions, compulsions, relationships that are not working, careers that dissatisfy, an outbreak of Uving in the future and pathological re-enactment of the past. People with most of these problems are more likely than those without to have low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin, the so-called 'happiness brain chemical'. Given that there is a chemistry of despair, you might suppose that it has a chemical, physical cause. Perhaps the problem is pollution. Is it something to do with the processing of the foods we eat or the methods of cultivation of the raw materials? Maybe the new technologies, such as mobile phones and computers, are interfering with our brains? Although it is not impossible that some of these things are contributing, by far the strongest contender for explaining what has gone wrong is the way we organize our society. I shall show that advanced cap-itahsm, as currently organized, creates low-serotonin societies. Far from being the product of other chemicals, serotonin levels in animal and human brains largely reflect what is happening around them, socially and emotionally, now and in the past. If you are feeling lousy today or in urgent need of a drink or a fix or a fling or a fight, you probably have low serotonin levels caused by the way we live now. Put crudely, advanced capitalism makes money out of misery and dissatisfaction, as if it were encouraging us to fill the psychic void with material goods. It can also profit from fostering spurious individualism by encouraging us to define ourselves through our purchases, with ever