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BY LEIGH GALLAGHER
THE BEVERLY HILLS PORTFOLIO
manager felt his world falling apart. After losing half of his net worth and most of his
clients within four months last year, he couldn't sleep. Then he started having panic attacks;
finally he was unable to drive on the freeway. He felt cut down at the knees," says James
Gottfurcht, the clinical psychologist who is treating him. A pared-back lifestyle and discussions
about childhood feelings of inferiority have helped, Gottfurcht says. The antidepressant Paxil
helps, too.
Seems like only yesterday the megarich were complaining of
"sudden wealth syndrome" - shock guilt and shame resulting from a precipitous and vast
accumulation of wealth. No sooner did the Nasdaq top 5000 than a flurry of firms popped up
to help handle the anguish.
"Never before have financial success and self-esteem been so commingled," said Stephen Goldbart,
psychologist and co-founder of San Francisco's Money, Meaning & Choices Institute, founded to
ease the pain on the way up.
Now Goldbart and his peers are helping ease the pain on the way down.
"The anxiety is palpable," says Howard Wallman, another Los Angeles psychologist.
Nowhere does the loss smart more than in Silicon Valley, where the accumulation of paper
wealth over the last decade has rivaled any in history. Goldbart recalls one patient,
a 30-year-old dot-com executive whose net worth sank from $20 million to nothing within four
months. "He was suicidal," says Goldbart who counseled him to realize the drop was
unpredictable and not his fault.
Goldbart says the worst cases have been young-and-single technologists who,
caught up in the entrepreneurial subculture, invested everything they had in their companies
and treated them like extended families. "You're talking about taking away not just their
bank account but their social identity and their image,'' says Goldbart. "Everything real
that mattered in their life was there."
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Now they're embarrassed. "Silicon Valley is a place where people place a huge premium on their
intelligence," says Douglas Rait, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Stanford.
"To admit that they didn't see this coming has left a lot of people humiliated."
In other ways the rich react much like anyone else. One Bay Area executive became unable to open his mail, fearing each new envelope would be a bill. "People always say about
the wealthy, "So they lost a million? They have several million left," says Richard Grist, clinical
instructor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. '[But] losing that million makes the wealthy
just as anxious as it would the nonwealthv".
Ronit Lami, a psychologist with London-based Allenbridge Group, saw one centimillionaire lose a chunk
of his net worth and opt not to heat his swimming pool. "He was completely irrational" she says.
An unheated pool? One shudders.
Therapist Wallman says many of his wealthy patients come in simply
wanting Xanax, Zoloft or whatever is the anti-depressant du jour. "That's how they're used to
doing things," he says. "They want to buy a quick fix"
Solution: a new breed of practices that marry financial planning with
emotional counseling. They range from one couch shops to the estate-planning departments of huge
law firms and financial institutions that are partnering with shrinks to counsel their wealthy
clients. The "wealth counseling" industry will gather for the first time next month in Albuquerque,
N.M. Some of these outfits call themselves "consultants" as a favor to their high-profile clientele.
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Even in Europe where therapy has long been regarded as being for
weak and whiny Americans, the moneyed are seeking emotional help. In London,
Lami, also a licensed hypnotist, helps Allenbridge clients "overcome emotional and behavioral
problems brought on by wealth."
So what are those? It depends on the source of the wealth. Inheritors, for
example, experience different problems than those who earned their wads but either way troubles
can reach the point of paranoia. "If shame is already an issue, some people tend to believe the
higher their net worth the more shameful a person they are,'' says Dennis Pearce, a clinical
psychologist in Natick, Mass.
Statistically, it's hard to know whether the superwealthy have more than their
share of head cases. "Everybody has issues," says Helene Stein, psychologist and cofounder
of Needham, Mass. based Family Legacy Services. "Wealth either makes it worse or hides it for longer."
One study estimates that 10% of senior executives exhibit symptoms of manic
depression; years ago an informal survey of The Forbes 400 found that 37% considered themselves unhappy.
A study published earlier this year in the British Medical Journal found that wealthy people who
were mentally ill were three times as likely to commit suicide as their nonwealthy counterparts.
Of cours, there are those who want no part of the hand-holding. "I don't feel like
I have any extra pressures," says Mark Cuban, billionaire founder of Broadcast.com and
rabble-rousing owner of pro basketball's Dallas Mavericks. "There is only one reason
someone might go to a shrink after you make lots of money," he says. "And that is because
it's a surefire way to get more press."
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