According to current thinking anyone who fails to succeed must have something wrong with them The pressure to achieve & be happy is taking a heavy toll resulting in a warped view of the self disorientation & despair People are lonelier than ever before Today's pay-for-performance mentality is turning institutions such as schools universities & hospitals into businesses
- even individuals are being made to think of themselves as one-person enterprises Love is increasingly hard to find & we struggle to lead meaningful lives In What about Me? Paul Verhaeghe's main concern is how social change has led to this psychic crisis & altered the way we think about ourselves He investigates the effects of 30 years of neoliberalism free-market forces privatisation & the relationship between our engineered society & individual identity It turns out that who we are is as always determined by the context in which we live From his clinical experience as a psychotherapist Verhaeghe shows the profound impact that social change is having on mental health even affecting the nature of the disorders from which we suffer But his book ends on a note of cautious optimism Can we once again become masters of our fate?