How Do Stock Markets Impact The Mental Health Of Financers?
Research reveals that uncertainties in the stock markets are linked to high incidences of suicide and hospitalization
In 1929, a young man named Lytle shot himself in a hotel in Milwaukee. He left behind four cents and a suicide note. It read “my body should go to science, my soul to Andrew W. Mellon, and sympathy to my creditors.”
Lytle’s suicide note was a verbal representation of the finance-related suicide pandemic that raged in the US after The Great Depression of 1929–30. Statistics showed that suicide rates peaked with 21.3% of every 100,000 Americans taking their own lives.
Contemporary urban legends ran that ruined financiers at Wall Street waited in line to get a window in high-rise buildings to jump off.
They also flocked to bridges to pitch themselves out.
Speculators were selling space for bodies in New York’s East River and morgues and burial homes were flooding with registration requests from families of victims.
Physicians tried their best to treat the hoards of financiers who suffered nervous breakdowns. But many killed themselves and their families with a gun or by turning up the gas.
The Great Crash of 1929 was the first instance in history that exposed the ill effects that the stock market has on mental health.
Recent research confirmed that the stock market is being increasingly associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD),
workaholism, substance use disorders, anxiety, mood disorders, chronic insomnia, and self-harm tendencies.
Moreover, studies showed that a fall in the stock price index resulted in increased hospitalizations for mental disorders by the magnitude of 5.32% for men and by 3.81% for women worldwide.
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