I went to school on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was a place where the children of African despots, American super lawyers, British tax exiles and Russian “businessmen” played hopscotch with the cream of the United Nations.

It was also the 1990s, so money pervaded. The older kids drove themselves to school in sparkly SUVs and some of the younger children had chauffeurs. The uniform was Gant or Gaultier and every Tuesday afternoon we went skiing. In retrospect I see that, as seats of learning go, it was borderline ridiculous but it felt normal at the time, with one exception: most of the children were miserable.

It figured that the boarders would be such, levered from exotic palaces into a draughty Swiss manor house, but why were the day kids so doom-laden? They had every material luxury going; bedrooms stuffed with gadgetry and large swimming pools around which to waste whole summers perfecting a tan.

Their parents adored them too, some obsessively so. By day these mums and dads commanded boardrooms at Procter & Gamble or the World Trade Organisation, but free time was for egging their charges on, monitoring report cards, barking at teachers for any perceived slight on their poppet’s genius and footing the bill for chichi extracurricular activities such as ice hockey lessons or tours of the ancient world.

Thanks to these alpha parents’ first-rate genes and nonstop cocktail parties, their scions were both very good-looking and highly adept at small talk — creating a fata morgana that they were charming and well adjusted.

Yet beneath the charm lurked something approaching despair; under their glossy, competent veneers my peers were empty vessels, often with no idea who they were at all. This manifested itself in endemic delinquency and depression.

Some took the nastier varieties of class A drugs (methamphetamines, heroin), plenty of boys made full use of the country’s relaxed prostitution laws, while the girls yearned for but two things: a vodka tonic and an eating disorder. Even those without a specific vice floated about spiritlessly.

One evening, when I was 15, I remember watching as a handsome, madly wealthy boy in the year above, blitzed on horse tranquillisers, sat on a platform at the railway station dashing his head against a stone wall. When the police and ambulance men arrived he butted them too before being carted off to some distant sanitorium, never to be heard from again.

It was all very Bret Easton Ellis (the blood streamed down his patrician features and soaked his Ralph Lauren shirt right through), a fact I was reminded of last week when I read a new book by Dr Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege (HarperCollins US, available on Amazon). In this manifesto Levine, an American psychoanalyst, claims that children of affluence (she’s not talking millionaire fantasyland here, rather households earning more than £63,000 a year) are more prone than any other section of young society to suffer from depression, anxiety and eating disorders or to engage in substance abuse or self-harm.

The germ of the thesis arrived at her office a few years back in the form of a personable 15-year-old patient. The daughter of rich, loving parents, she wore her sleeves down over her fingers. When Levine asked her what she was hiding she pulled them up to reveal the word “EMPTY” that she had cut into her left forearm.

Levine says this was her “aha moment” and that, looking back over the previous week’s schedule, she realised her practice had become overrun with prosperity’s unhappy children. She called colleagues in other cities to see if they had come across the phenomenon and heard tales of Ferraris totalled by Chicago cheerleaders and a popular East Coast jock who, despite not needing the money, still chose to deal ecstasy after football practice. Most disturbing was the statistic that underpinned it all — adolescent suicide has quadrupled since 1950. She had uncovered an epidemic and the book is full of the research and statistics that prove it.

But could parents with money be especially bad for a child’s health? Yes says Levine, who has identified the confluence of elements, specific to the wealthy, that create “the perfect storm” for rich kids — namely materialism, pressure to achieve, rabid perfectionism and a resulting value system that is so ugly and askew that it verges on the putrid.

This, she writes, has formed a generation of affluent children so disconnected and numb that “an alarming number lack the basic foundation of psychological development: an authentic sense of self”.