|
On a
private island 20 minutes by helicopter from central
London, a hovercraft sits on the lawn of a turreted
Edwardian manor house as swallows swoop around.
Trees
and wildflowers line a lane that leads to a cluster of
buildings that house a pool table, a 12-seat movie
theater and an art studio. A yacht is moored nearby.
The
island isn’t a country hideaway. It’s the Causeway
Retreat, a mental health and addiction center that
charges as much as £10,000 ($20,000) a week for
treatment away from the prying eyes of colleagues and
the media. There is a waiting list for the facility’s 15
rooms.
“We get
lots of CEOs of companies, traders, high-end business
guys,” says managing director Brendan Quinn. “They want
treatment, but they want it to be discreet.”
Financial services firms in the UK are trying to break
the stigma of mental illness as the number of people
seeking help increases. JPMorgan Cazenove Ltd. and
Herbert Smith Llp. sponsored a conference last week
where employers were urged to do more to help workers
with psychological problems and recognize they can still
be productive.
Mental
health is a growing concern as the credit crunch adds to
stress in the City of London, the UK capital’s financial
district. The number of men in the City who sought help
for depression and stress rose 47 percent from a year
earlier in the past three months, according to British
United Provident Association Ltd., the UK’s largest
private health insurer.
About
40,000 people in the UK financial industry will lose
their jobs during the next three years, according to
Experian Group Ltd., with London bearing the brunt.
“I’m
getting three times as many referrals as I was a year
ago, particularly from the corporate sector, and a lot
of that’s related to the financial crisis,” says
Bennedict Cannon, a London psychotherapist. “This has
been the busiest early summer I’ve known in 10 years.”
Don
Serratt, chief executive officer of Lifeworks, a private
treatment facility set in the countryside at Old Woking,
southwest of London, says he saw a 20-percent increase
in admissions of City workers in the first six months of
the year compared with the same period in 2007.
“What
happens in these environments becomes so unbearable when
times are bad because everyone’s really frightened that
they’re next and they’re going to lose their job,” says
Serratt, who was the London-based head of European
mergers and acquisitions for Creditanstalt Bank until
1998. He quit after a battle with addictions and severe
clinical depression, which he says were exacerbated by
the City’s environment.
Unhappiness index
Even in
a world of six-figure salaries, bankers report an
atmosphere of unhappiness.
Fifty-eight percent of people working in banking and
finance say they have seen someone cry as a result of
stress at work, according to a nfpSynergy report for the
Samaritans, a confidential help line that fields more
than 13,000 calls daily, 20 percent from suicidal
people.
The
industry was recently ranked last in the City & Guilds
Happiness Index, based on a survey of 2,000 people in 20
professions. Beauty therapists were first.
“The
whole culture of ensuring the stress is dealt with
appropriately is missing from the City,” says Sean
Kelly, London outreach coordinator for the Samaritans.
“The very idea that you could be marked as weak shows
what a hostile environment it is.”
At any
given time, one in six employees in Britain will be
affected by “depression, anxiety or another mental
health condition to a clinically diagnosable degree,”
according to a study by the London-based Sainsbury
Center for Mental Health.
At last
week’s conference, Dennis Stevenson, chairman of HBOS
Plc., Britain’s biggest mortgage lender, said his
20-year battle with depression showed it is possible to
suffer from mental health problems and have a successful
career.
Stevenson, 62, said being in the “trough” of endogenous
depression, caused by a chemical imbalance rather than
stress, was worse than the pain he felt when he broke
his leg skiing and the paramedics shut the ambulance
door on the limb.
“It’s by
a long way the worst experience I’ve had in my life, but
I managed to keep working,” he told an audience of 150,
including representatives of Credit Suisse Group,
Linklaters Llp. and Lloyds TSB Group Plc. “It’s the
responsibility of the people at the top of businesses to
create a culture and an environment in which people know
they can be open without damaging their career.”
Macho
attitude
Mike
McPhillips, a London psychiatrist whose client list
includes CEOs, company chairmen and their families, says
denial about mental health problems is rife in Britain,
particularly in the “macho” atmosphere of the financial
industry.
“English
people are very much slower by and large to accept they
are suffering with a psychological problem,” McPhillips
says. “People come along way too late when there’s a lot
of damage already done to them, their families, to their
relationships and to their children.”
Jonathan
Naess, who organized the conference, set up Stand to
Reason, a charity that aims to break the taboo of
discussing mental health problems, after he returned to
work as an equity partner for Nabarro Wells & Co.
following a breakdown.
He had
left his London office one afternoon for a coffee, and
less than an hour later was restrained by six police
officers who took him to a psychiatric hospital. A shop
clerk who was alarmed at his erratic behavior had called
the police.
“I was
terrified and thought I’d walked into One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest,’’ said Naess, 40, who asked that the date
of the episode not be revealed. “Then the penny dropped.
It was the best place for me to be.’’
His
colleagues helped him return to work gradually, starting
with light duties, after he had been treated for bipolar
disorder, also known as manic depression. He was soon
earning more for the company than before his breakdown.
There’s
a growing industry to help professionals get the
assistance they need while remaining on the job, with
more treatment being offered at evenings and weekends.
“It is
an increasing trend that people are not wanting their
mental health problems to interfere with their work,”
says John Wilkins, a psychiatrist at the Priory
Hospital, Roehampton, a 107-bed private psychiatric
hospital in southwest London.
Nurse in
a suit
Although
executives have to confront the truth about their
illness, doctors at the Causeway encourage them to
decide for themselves how much their colleagues and
employers need to know about their condition, giving
them the option to pretend they are merely conducting
business while on vacation.
If
someone needs to go to London for a meeting, a nurse can
be dressed in a suit, given a file and made to look like
a business associate, Quinn says.
In the
book-lined billiard room of the manor house, Quinn
recalls the day one of Britain’s 100-largest publicly
traded companies held a board meeting there because a
member was a patient. Everything was arranged so there
was no hint why he was there, Quinn says.
“We had
four helicopters on the lawn, put a sheet of timber over
the billiard table, laid out a meal and had 14 people
sitting down for a meeting,’’ he says. “I don’t think
somebody has to go and tell the world about a problem if
they don’t want to.” He declined to name the company.
In
addition to group and individual therapy and, where
necessary, treatment using the island’s fully stocked
pharmacy, patients are encouraged to exercise and take
up long-neglected hobbies. One man spent a month
stripping a motorbike and rebuilding it, which he’d
wanted to do since he was a teenager, Quinn says.
Outside
a former candy store that is now used for group therapy,
a silver-haired client passes by on a bicycle. Quinn
says he’s a top executive at a publicly traded company.
“The
whole idea of this place is we try to teach people
there’s a life outside of work,’’ Quinn says. “When did
he last cycle down a country lane without his BlackBerry
going off?” |
