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"Doctor, my brother thinks he's a chicken."
"How long has this been going on?"
"Three years. We would have come sooner but we needed the eggs."
Woody Allen, Annie Hall
 HERE is no couch in Dr Ronit Lami's office, just computers, files, some classy pictures on the walls and a pair of comfy armchairs, good for sinking back into and getting some things off your mind. A neatly-dressed, smart woman, Lami is in the process of setting up Britain's most unusual psychological therapy practice. Where other doctors treat neurotics or psychopaths, or the terminally shy or dysfunctional, Lami specializes in treating rich people suffering shame, guilt, anger or fear.
She works not in a clinic but from the plush Mayfair offices of a firm of private bankers and financial advisers called Allenbridge. Between selling hedge funds and sorting out their inheritance taxes, wealthy clients can shuffle off to Lami to get their brains sorted out as well. Lots of bankers verge on the eccentric. Many of their clients may also border on the insane. No other firm has gone to the extreme lengths of installing a shrink in a corner of the office. "We're combining psychological with financial experience," explains Anthony Yadoaroff, chief executive of Allenbridge Group. "Having served private clients for 15 years, we have a sense of how and why these problems are caused. And now we have the expertise to help people solve them."
If you feet burdened by your wealth and want to get fixed, Lami is your woman. The guiding principle of her sub-branch of psychology? That the rich have problems too - not just how many butlers to hire, or which Mercedes to drive, but real issues of obsessive behavior, dysfunctional families and unhappy marriages. The condition trades under the snappy name of affluenza, the affliction of an unbalanced relationship with money or wealth
"The kind of people who create wealth don't usually know they have
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a problem," explains Lami. "They are often in denial. But that doesn't mean the problems are not there."
In America, not surprisingly, affluenza is a much bigger deal than it has been so far in Europe. Jessie O'Neill, grand-daughter of a onetime president of General Motors, has set herself up as a leading authority on the subject through books such as The Golden Ghetto. "Simply defined," she observes, "affluenza is a dysfunctional relationship with money and wealth or the pursuit of it. Anyone, regardless of their net worth, who believes that they must be rich, that more is always better, is a self condemned prisoner of the golden ghetto."
Even though the economic statistics may now make more worrying reading for the wealth creators, Lami's trade should still be booming. Many people have salted money away during recent years of plenty; in any part of the world, affluenza is likely to be a growing, issue. The strong global economy, free trade and relatively peaceful world have meant the very rich have ,been one of the fastest growing tribes in the world. In a recent report by Merrill Lynch and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, 180,000 people worldwide had joined its ranks of high net worth individuals (otherwise known as stonkingly rich people), whom the report defines as those people with investable assets excluding property of above $1m, during the past year. But Allenbridge points out that in a recent survey of Forbes, top 400 richest people, 37 per cent of the sample said they were unhappy.
There are now 7.2 million dollar-millionaires around the world, controlling assets of $27 trillion. In Switzerland, one in every 40 people is now a millionaire, which means that any bar or café? in Zurich you wander into is likely to be playing host to at least a couple.
Lami's casebook is a study in afflictions of wealth, breathing testimony to the old saw that whatever else it might be that money can buy you - seemingly, depression, addiction and guilt -happiness itself is never in stock. Lami's day is
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