Last week, The Guardian ran a column entitled “I’m a therapist to the super-rich: they are as miserable as Succession makes out.” At face value, the piece is pure clickbait: a textbook example of the kind of headline that tends to drive traffic in a social media economy that thrives on provocation. And sure enough, it’s been greeted by an all-too-predictable deluge of comments expressing a mixture of schadenfreude and lack of sympathy for the exorbitantly wealthy. Let a thousand quote tweets bloom.

But the op-ed penned by Clay Cockrell — a psychotherapist who by chance became a specialist in treating ultrawealthy individuals and who now finds HBO’s Succession closer to documentary than drama — is well worth reading for the flicker of insight it offers into the inner lives of the superrich.

Just as the headline suggests, many of Cockrell’s clients find happiness elusive despite the unfathomable personal freedom and material comfort that come from wealth. Having indulged their children, some struggle to be effective parents. Many reportedly have trouble forming noninstrumental or nontransactional relationships, find it difficult to trust those around them, and feel devoid of meaning or purpose in life. The issue of money itself, meanwhile, is both prickly and uncomfortable, and it’s clear from existing research that many wealthy people experience a kind of perpetual status anxiety rather than the sense of security one might expect. As Cockrell writes: