Suzanne Harrington: Lucky I'm too poor to suffer from Succession Syndrome

The Roy family - the squabbling siblings at the centre of US drama Succession.

A recovery centre in Zurich treats people with what’s being called ‘Succession Syndrome’. 

For around €123,000 a week, you can get therapy, accommodation, vitamins, a chef, and a driver. Oh, and discretion, privacy, five-star luxury, blah blah.

Because Succession Syndrome is not acute withdrawal from the scheming Roy troika and their despicable minions, but an affliction you or I are too old and too poor to ever have to worry about: Affluent neglect.

Succession Syndrome, freshly coined by those five-star Swiss clinicians, is a private jet/private yacht/private island kind of dysfunction that affects children of the super-rich. It’s emotional neglect from absent power parents farming children out to be raised by staff, coupled with intense pressure on those children not to be weak and not to fail.

The poor rich kids grow up with attachment issues, substance issues, narcissistic issues — all the issues. So while the neglect isn’t untreated nits or Pot Noodle for dinner, it can still involve depression, anxiety, and addiction — just with chauffeurs and maids.

But because the rest of us are so busy scrabbling to pay the rent, or queuing up in A&E and hoping we don’t die on a trolley, we may find it hard to empathise with a depressed billionaire, even if they were reared by individuals who went to the Logan Roy school of parenting.

The point is that too much money and not enough money both screw you up. Being too rich and being too poor means you cannot flourish. We all know how being too poor affects people; we daily step over sleeping bags on pavements. 

But being too rich is like pouring bleach on our innate humanity; it kills meaning, drive, empathy, and connection. If you are so cocooned in wealth that the only thing you can be bothered doing is heroin, what’s the point?

While we blame the poor for being poor, because it’s easier that way, maybe we need to rescue the super-rich from themselves, and reintegrate them — and their wealth — back into society. 

Any structure that permits and encourages the pathological hoarding of wealth by a tiny handful of individuals is broken; yet instead of capping it, so that the word ‘billionaire’ becomes a quaint quirk of the early 21st century before society came to its senses, we put these individuals on magazine covers. 

We make rich lists about them. We look up to them, as though they are somehow better/brighter/cleverer: They’re not. They’re just recipients of a skewed system, a system tolerated by the rest of us because we’ve been hoodwinked by it. Brainwashed by its bullshit.

Nor should we rely on any real-life Roys to voluntarily redistribute their wealth, even if they get to call themselves philanthropists and have university wings named after them. We need structural reform, where the wealth gap is not just narrowed, but eliminated completely.

Erased forever: No more street homelessness, no more Succession Syndrome.

Because even monkeys share bananas better than us.