The Book
Rich, Powerful and Not Enough
Why those who have everything suffer the most
A book by Jan Gerber, founder of Paracelsus Recovery.
Why I wrote this book
One question has run through my whole career: why do people who seem to ‘have everything’ so often suffer more than people who have far less?
Part of my quest for an answer is personal. I built Paracelsus Recovery, our single-client treatment residence in Zurich, while building my own wealth, driven by the same hunger that brings many of our clients to us. When I finally reached the success my sense of self had been organised around, I found what almost all our clients find: the problems I was sure money would solve did not disappear. If anything, they hardened.
This book is my attempt to answer this question. It is not a polemic against success, nor a romanticisation of poverty, but an honest account of what extreme wealth can do to a person, and of why we find it so hard, as a culture, to admit it.
Wealth and mental health: what the book argues
- The wealthy are marginalised (not economically of course). They are the last group many people feel free to despise, and that stigma takes a toll on their mental health.
- Systems form people. Much of the coldness we condemn in the powerful as personality flaws are injuries produced by the conditions of extreme wealth.
- Blame is convenient. Wealth creates conditions that would leave anyone lonely, anxious, paranoid or depressed. Blaming the individual spares the rest of us from looking at a system we play a role in.
- Clinicians often fail this group. Too many idealise or moralise ultra-wealthy clients, which isolates them further.
- This matters now. A handful of people hold enormous power over the world, and few have looked at what it has done to them.
Drawing on psychotherapist Paul Hokemeyer’s work on cultural competency, I look at what wealth does to the mind, and at how clinicians and the rest of us can take its risks seriously.
Read the first chapter early
Leave your email and I will send you the first chapter before the book is released.
The podcast
The conversations behind the book continue on the podcast of the same name, every other Thursday.