People are looking to a "wild assortment of gurus of fashion, diet, health and spirituality" for answers to their problems, according to an English professor of mental health nursing.
"People are slavishly following fashion. They are volunteering to be bullied and humiliated on 'reality television' or craving direction, leadership or 'life-coaching' by a wild assortment of gurus of fashion, diet, health or spirituality," according to Prof Barker, a leading UK academic on mental healthcare.
Discussing the development of the so-called "therapy culture", Prof Barker quoted sociologist Frank Furedi saying, "Our contemporary culture is fostering a climate where people really do feel ill, insecure and emotionally damaged . . . where people seek solace and affirmation through diagnosis."
According to Prof Barker, the late American social critic, Christopher Lasch, anticipated the celebrity age in which people "experience an inner emptiness which they try to avoid by living vicariously through others or in seeking spiritual masters and other gurus".
Prof Barker suggests that instead we need to look more to ourselves, our families, friends and our cultural roots to deal with life.
"I've met thousands of people recovering [from life's problems] who talk about it in their own voices rather than having to learn a lot of psychobabble to explain their experiences," he said.
Prof Barker was speaking at the Health4Life conference at the School of Nursing in Dublin City University yesterday.
Another speaker at the DCU conference spoke at length about how the medical model of chronic psychiatric disorders is now giving way to a recovery model of mental illness.
"The culture of enduring psychiatric disorders was a life-stealing enterprise which ignored stories of resilience," said Priscilla Ridgway, assistant professor at Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven Connecticut, United States.
"It also brought with it an enduring sense of stigma and clinical encounters which never looked at people's strengths, only their problems, symptoms and deficits," she said.
According to Prof Ridgway, the shift to a recovery orientation brings a new set of personal stories which focus on growth and resilience.
"The expert voice will have to tone itself down and listen because people [with mental health problems] are now reclaiming their health and wellness by using all kinds of different traditions and practices from exercise to meditation," she said.
The third keynote speaker at the first day of this annual conference was Prof Arthur Frank, professor of sociology at the University of Calgary, Canada.
Prof Frank spoke about how his own experiences of heart disease and cancer prompted him to write about illness.
"The biggest problem in healthcare is the disconnection between [ healthcare] workers doing their everyday jobs and people who were living through an enormous crisis in their lives," he said.
The Health4Life conference continues today with a talk by the radical Hungarian-born American-based psychiatrist, Prof Thomas Szasz.
