They’re among the wealthiest people in the world. Even when they lose big, as many have in the ongoing economic meltdown, their piles of cash are still bigger than most.
But in the past month, five major financial players, including two last week, have committed suicide, leaving many who have lost their homes, careers and retirement savings in the recent financial turmoil scratching their heads as they go on living.
For people like Adolf Merckle, a German billionaire who jumped in front of a train Monday after losing hundreds of millions of dollars in investments, failure destroys their self-esteem and leads to the demise of their identity, mental health experts said. The same may be true for Chicago real-estate executive Steven L. Good, who shot himself in the head while sitting in his Jaguar Monday a month after he publicly worried over a challenging market.
A London investment-fund executive, a French nobleman, and a veteran Bears Stearns Co. manager also recently committed suicide.
“People derive social status, a sense of self-meaning and importance from both how much they’re earning and being experts,” said Nada Stotland, a psychiatrist and president of the American Psychiatric Association. “So much of their self-esteem is related to that activity, and when they lose it, they lose their sense of identity, too.”
Those who reach the top of the financial world tend to be highly competitive, mental health experts said. They’re used to being successful and “may not be prepared for failure personally or publicly,” said psychologist Dan Reidenberg, the executive director of Suicide Awareness Voices of Education in Minnesota. “When it happens, they don’t always have the internal resources to ameliorate the pain.”
For the most part, the personal trials and tribulations of the wealthy aren’t publicized, so public failures can pack a bigger punch, experts said.
That form of public shaming may have helped contribute to French financier Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet’s suicide. He was found with his wrists slashed in his New York City office Dec. 23, just weeks after learning he had lost his fortune and that of his family and friends. Villehuchet invested $1.4 billion in Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme.
The spate of suicides conjures images of Wall Street brokers diving from windows following the 1929 market crash. While historians point out that such stories are mostly myth, the slow recovery that defined the Great Depression also was marked by a rising tide of suicides.
The highest suicide rate ever recorded in the United States was in 1932, when unemployment peaked at 25 percent, and 17 out of 100,000 people killed themselves. In 2005, the most recent year data is available, the rate was 11 out of 100,000.
It won’t be clear for some time if the national psyche has headed into a similarly dark period; there’s a three-year lag on government suicide data.
But, Reidenberg said, “we should be preparing ourselves.” During the Depression, there was little science on preventing suicides, but that’s now changed, and “we can take proactive measures to prevent future tragedies.”
“We need to prepare and be realistic about what might happen.”
