Depression II

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/business/yourmoney/12shrink.html?pagewanted=1&th
Depression, a Frequent Visitor to Wall St.
LANDON THOMAS Jr.

James Yang

EARLY one afternoon in July, Dennis J. Bertrum, a former top brokerage executive at Prudential Securities, leapt out of the bedroom window of his 26th-floor apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

No note was found, but the police said the death was a suicide.

In and out of work since 1996, Mr. Bertrum, a pioneer in the managed account business who was described by friends as a bon vivant, had been on a persistent quest to return to the brokerage business that he had loved since his days selling stocks for E. F. Hutton in the 1970's, colleagues say. But for Mr. Bertrum, an unemployed 55-year-old who friends say had a history of Jekyll-and-Hyde-type mood swings, few doors were opening.

Just weeks before he took his own life, he had been interviewing for a senior job in the private wealth management division of Merrill Lynch but he and the firm could not come to terms, friends said, adding that they do not blame the firm for what ultimately happened. Merrill declined to comment. Instead, his friends and family described a man who for years had been in therapy for a bipolar condition and who had quit taking his medication, Wellbutrin, just three weeks before his death. Mr. Bertrum was twice divorced and in the process of ending a relationship, and family members say that with no income, he was feeling financial pressure. His brother, Carl A. Butrum, who called him a week before he died, said he was on a down swing.

For a man who had achieved financial and professional success in the 1990's, the letdown of not securing the Merrill job could have been brutal, his friends and family said.

"It's pretty traumatic when you are in your 50's, you are skilled and can operate at a high level but your expectations don't pan out," said Stephen C. Winks, a financial consultant and a former colleague of Mr. Bertrum's at Prudential. "I think it weighed heavily on him."

Suicides in the brokerage industry are rare, and those that can be documented have been linked in the public mind to wiped-out portfolios and plummeting markets like those of 1929, 1987 and even 2000. But the chronic depression associated with suicides is not rare on Wall Street.

A survey conducted in 2000 - the only known study of its kind - concluded that 23 percent of a small sampling of male brokers and traders at seven of the largest firms on Wall Street suffered from clinical depression, a rate far above what was then the national average of 7 percent for men. And that was before the market fell by one-third from its record high, before Wall Street firms shed 30,000 jobs and before an explosion of investor lawsuits and arbitration cases.

All of this has led some experts to conclude that the rate of depression among brokers and traders is related more to the grinding pressures of a rapidly changing industry than to the vicissitudes of the markets.

"Brokers have little control over their jobs or the outcomes of their trades," said Alden M. Cass, a licensed clinical psychologist who wrote the study and now coaches Wall Street traders and brokers on coping with the psychological travails of their professions. "These frustrations can lead to a form of 'learned helplessness,' or a feeling that you are in a prison with no way out. Such feelings have been linked to levels of clinical depression."

Relatively few brokers and bankers appear to be seeking professional help to cope with the pressure, according to data collected by insurance companies. Experts say many brokers fear that doing so would be seen by their employers as a sign of weakness in a high-testosterone industry like finance. So brokers bottle up their feelings and soldier on - until they crack, health professionals say.

"I would have predicted higher rates of behavioral health claims for stock brokers because of the high stress," said Dr. Ronald S. Leopold, the national director for group disability at MetLife, who collected the data. "But what we see in jobs where there is a combination of tremendous stress and opportunity is the work-until-you-drop phenomenon. There is no question in my mind that these people have high rates of depression, and it is no wonder that we are seeing some of them crash." MR. BERTRUM'S story - a terrible piece of life-altering news causes a man already close to the edge to teeter off it - bears an eerie similarity to that of Raymond J. Foster, a broker and branch manager in the Cleveland office of Prudential Securities.

Three years ago, Mr. Foster, 60, a 10-year veteran of the firm, was abruptly fired, denied any severance and barred from returning to his office. Shocked by the news, he returned - glassy-eyed and quiet, according to a police report - to his home in the suburb of Shaker Heights and put an end to his life with one blast from a shotgun.

Hours later, his wife, Patricia, discovered his body slumped over in a chair in the family's garage. In the kitchen, she found a hastily scribbled note, but it offered no explanation for what he had done.
According to former colleagues, Mr. Foster was facing escalating pressures at the office, where he was struggling to please a new regional supervisor. A spokesman for Wachovia Securities, formerly Prudential, declined to comment.

Mr. Foster was not an introspective man, or prone to revealing his innermost feelings, colleagues said. Voluble at the office, where he was by all accounts a respected branch manager who liked to talk about his collection of Porsches, he had become more withdrawn at home and offered his wife no window into his black moods. "In retrospect, it's apparent that Ray was able to mask his deepest feelings of depression and rage," Mrs. Foster said.

Mr. Foster apparently never sought help, according to his wife, even though some of his colleagues recalled how the mounting burden of his job had led to the occasional outburst. "This job comes with pressure," said Terrence Diehl, a former broker at Prudential who worked for Mr. Foster. "I have seen guys in tight places. Some guys work through it and some guys lie down."

Keeping his clients from pursuing the second option has been Mr. Cass's mission for two years. After completing his study on broker depression, Mr. Cass, 28, built a private practice called the Catalyst Strategies Group where he offers executive coaching sessions - distinct from traditional therapy sessions - to a small but growing number of frazzled brokers and bankers. They have spurned the in-house counseling services offered by their employers, choosing instead to pay $250 an hour for coaching from Mr. Cass, who earned his doctorate at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Other professionals counsel brokers, but few market themselves as aggressively as Mr. Cass, who has a Web site with testimonials from the bankers he has helped.

With a management consultant's style and his deep summer tan, Mr. Cass does not come across as the typical psychologist. He also brings a knowledge of banking and finance, honed while hanging out in Wall Street bars when he was studying for his doctorate in the late 1990's. He offers his clients a variety of options so that they may be more productive at the office: straight-up coaching sessions, 24-hour phone access and a special program, called "back in 45," in which he meets a client for a 45-minute lunch and strives to lift him up from the slough of his despond. (Lunch is on the client.)

HE takes special care, as well, to talk the language of Wall Street, spurning clinical terms - including the word "depression" itself - that may conjure up in wary brokers' minds the specter of a couch and a ticking clock. Instead, he prefers a more accessible vernacular, encouraging clients to "think bullish," "don't be bearish" and "don't aim, just throw the ball." His approach is not the only unorthodox aspect of his practice. His office is a cramped suite in an anonymous office building near Madison Square Garden, not the neighborhood that jumps to mind for a psychologist.

On a recent evening, he had one of his original clients in for a coaching session, a broker who has worked in the industry for more than 20 years, switching from one job to another, from large Wall Street firms to smaller operations. Battling a history of depression, he had reached out to health professionals at his companies as well as independent therapists, but could find no succor before finding the name of Mr. Cass in an Internet search.

The broker earned as much as $250,000 a year during the bull market, but his salary had shrunk to $75,000 by the time he was fired, just a day before the coaching session. Jumpy and angular, with cufflinks that glimmered in the dim light of Mr. Cass's office, the broker recounted his firing as a miniature waterfall gurgled soothingly in the background. "He was screaming at me," said the broker, who asked not to have his name disclosed but did let a reporter sit in on his session, as he presented the details of his dismissal. "It was a complete dressing-down."

Sitting on a couch, the broker needed no prodding to plunge into his past neuroses and brutally analyze his current psychic state. Mr. Cass asked him how the dismissal made him feel.

"It was gut-wrenching," he said. "But I knew there was truth to what he was saying." The broker said he thought, "Let him fire me," and he asked the boss to pay him. "He said he would," the broker added, "but only after I gave him the keys to the office."

He paused, his eyes darting around the small office, crossing and uncrossing his legs. "It was a difficult day," he added. "My stomach was churning. I had headaches, a lot of psychological paralysis."

Nodding his head, Mr. Cass asked, "How does your wife take this?"

"We live in the age of the dot-com billionaire, and she wonders when it's going to happen to me," he said, bitterly. "It's just so hard to make a living on Wall Street." The broker's voice rose as he railed against the rising tide of complaints from customers and the relentless move toward online trading that was making it harder and harder to bring home a decent paycheck.

"You are a victim of circumstance," Mr. Cass said as he urged his client toward more bullish thinking. "I've been on Wall Street for 20 years - I don't have an M.B.A. or a C.P.A.," the broker said. "I have experience in getting customers, but now I feel emasculated, isolated. You are a man without a country."

Given his shrinking salary, the broker, who lives in a leafy New York suburb and has two children, wondered how he was going to make ends meet.

"I'm a lousy provider, an underachiever," he said, spitting out the words as if they were poison pellets. "We can't make it on my wife's income alone. What is going to become of us?"

He paused and spoke of the rage and the self-destructive thoughts that he said were consuming him that day. "You don't have your foot on the ledge," he added, letting his words trail off. "But I didn't want to be in traffic or in a crowded place. I didn't have a lot of control."

Taking it all in, Mr. Cass asked, "So what's the bullish thought?"

Again, the broker revisited the day of his firing. "He was screaming at me and I felt myself get smaller and smaller, like I was shrinking in a cartoon," he said before stopping himself. "But then I had the bullish thought: how silly this guy looked; I mean he looked like a raving idiot."

A smile tugged slightly at his lips.

Leaning forward, Mr. Cass responded: "Now you are in control. You are no longer in a cycle of bearish thoughts."

The broker told Mr. Cass that on the same day he was fired, he called an old colleague who offered him a job on the spot - in a new supervisory position. "I really have to be on my game now," he said. "But it's encouraging. At least I'm not lying in bed with two sheets over my head. That is what I did in the past."

Nodding with encouragement - rooting him on, it seemed - Mr. Cass said: "Look at you. You are starting fresh; now you can reset your business goals."

While the broker said the sessions with Mr. Cass had helped him, he conceded that at any time, events at the office could send him back into the kind of depressive fugue that sometimes leads to suicide.

"The act of suicide is an act to grasp control," he said. "I've been there. You are looking for a path but you begin to wonder whether the people around you might be better off without you. I remember there was a time when I would be driving to work, feeling the rigidness of my musculature at 7 a.m. And I forced myself to put a picture of my child's face in front of me. That's the only way I could keep going."