Every second day the newspapers carry a story relating to a symptom of what seems like some kind of collective unease, if not psychic disintegration, of the Irish people. Last week I caught two: a report in the Daily Irish Mail of a study indicating that we're now putting on weight faster than most of our European neighbours (the weight of an average citizen has over the past four years increased by 1.6kg/3.5lb) and a story in the Irish Examiner about Irish people having more frequent thoughts about suicide than any other nationality.
Whatever you make of these stories in themselves, what they say about us more generally is that we have lately started to become alert to changes in our psychic make-up in a manner that would have seemed comical to previous generations.
In parallel with the growth of this psychic hypochondria, there has developed a new industry in therapeutic analysis, usually manifesting at conferences in which various "experts" offer their two cents' worth of theory about what it all means. The Céifin Conference in Ennis has become a fixture in this annual therapeutic calendar. Organised by Catholic priest Fr Harry Bohan, it never fails to make the headlines with some crushing banality about the baneful fallout from prosperity. At last year's conference, President Mary McAleese warned of Irish society entering a "cul-de-sac of complacent consumerism" and urged us to "carry our shopping bags in one hand and our consciences in the other".
This year's conference has been well up to standard. Last Wednesday this newspaper carried a report from Céifin headed "Ireland is 'cash rich', but culturally poor". Janet Murray, a psychotherapist, identified "evidence in our culture of a very deep unease". Noting the high consumption of alcohol in Irish society, she observed that international research has identified much higher incidences of mental illness and addictiveness in Irish emigrants abroad than in the indigenous populations of the countries surveyed. She went on: "Binge drinking on our scale is not the celebration it appears but has always been a sign of deep unhappiness. Binge drinking on our scale and at our pace is not a party. Quite the contrary, it's more like a wake, and our society is potentially the corpse."
I can hardly disagree with this analysis, since I advanced it myself on at least 50 occasions in the 1990s. I was excited to see what would come next. Janet Murray seemingly went on to aver that the most striking thing about our present condition is "our refusal, collectively, to explore the real psychological roots of this long-standing distressed and distressing behaviour". Again, I have to agree with this, since I've said it many times. Again, I was interested in what would come next. But that, it appears, was it - a bit like going to the doctor to be told you have the flu and should have stayed in bed, which is what in your undoctorly ignorance you suspected in the first place. Since Ms Murray and her fellow panellists had a well-reported platform on which to explore all these issues, it is interesting that, given her disquiet concerning our failure to explore things in more detail, she does not appear - according to the report in this newspaper - to have moved beyond a reprise of the symptoms. This is par for the course for these events. What most of these over-reported exercises in self-analysis have in common is their avoidance of hard, and therefore potentially controversial, questions concerning social, political or religious realities. In what sense are we unhappy? How does eating and drinking to excess arise from unhappiness? What, indeed, is unhappiness? What is consumerism? What, come to that, is "complacent consumerism"? Is it useful to see depression mainly as a psychiatric condition? What does the word "spiritual" actually mean and can it be divorced from the idea of God?
Any discussion of the unease that allegedly besets us would take us deep into history. Any half-accurate description of collective psychic reality would look at the fine detail of Irish life and society and begin to deconstruct the ideologies that infect them. Any discussion of treatment would focus on the ultimate meaning(s) of existence. And yet these explorations are conspicuous by their absence from such platforms, which instead confine their contributions to the repetition of pieties and lamentations.
The net outcome is the fatuous suggestion that there is some as yet undiscovered avenue of self-understanding apart from the ones we are determined to avoid.
A key problem is that such analysis would be likely to run into ideological censorship by the media, whereas the repetition of "the end is nigh" messages ensures that the gathering and its unchallenging content will be reported. But the roots of the condition run deeper: we now live in a world where not only is nobody able to fix anything, but in which nobody seems to think that fixing things is what we're here for. Perhaps we are afraid that, if we healed ourselves, we would have nothing to talk about.