Are the 3,000 marketing messages we're subjected to on a daily basis overwhelming you? Does the automatic increase in the volume of TV ads grate? Maybe you're peeved by cynical multinational junk-food dealers targeting your children? Or perhaps your stress levels are still sky-high after our annual sacrifices at the altar of consumerism.
If you can identify with any of the above, you're displaying the symptoms of a toxic mental environment. Mirroring the civil rights, feminist and green movements of the late 20th century, the fight for a clean mental environment is shaping up as the defining human-rights battle of our information age.
So believes Kalle Lasn, author, "subvertiser" and founder of the 15-year-old North American organisation Adbusters (www.adbusters.org). "Thirty years ago, people became worried that the toxic physical environment was making people sick," he explains. "This anxiety gave birth to the green movement. Now we're in a time where people are stressed out, suffering from mood disorders, and a percentage of the population is on anti-depressants and anxiety medication; studies show that mood disorders, anxiety attacks and depressions have gone up by 300% in two generations.
"Advertisers have taken over everything, and there is a belief that the $450bn-a-year advertising industry may have peaked. It's time for the backlash, and that backlash is the clean mental environment."
Lasn believes that this movement will unite related but disparate groups under one banner, including ecologists, who realise that dwindling natural resources cannot support current levels of consumption, and the democratic media movement which resents the control of information, and power, by supranational media corporations.
The clean mental environment movement's basis, he says, is gut feeling. "At the Battle for Seattle, I asked young people, 'Why are you here? What are you fighting against?' Many said, 'Ever since I was a kid I've been lied to and propagandised to. The media's been selling me things, saying it will bring me happiness. I feel like I'm not a total human being, I'm wearing a barcode on my neck and I've been branded.'"
All the movement needs now is a snappy acronym and sophisticated branding to, er, market its message.