Nation’s stress level rises from financial fears

Albert Levy is a doctor to the wealthy. His Park Avenue office, in a building where co-op apartments start at $3 million, speaks to his success. As the nation lurches through this financial crisis, he’s paying a price for that status — calls at all hours from stressed-out patients, including a trio he received concerning one family Sunday:

•Call No. 1: A desperate call from the wife of a 48-year-old patient recently laid off by Credit Suisse, the international bank that sliced its workforce amid the credit crisis. Her husband had suffered an apparent heart attack, she said, and they were in a hospital emergency room.

•Call No. 2: The husband phoned. He described his acute chest pain and asked Levy to join them at the hospital.

•Call No. 3: This call came from hospital staff. Levy conferred with an emergency room doctor and they decided it wasn’t a heart attack. It was acute anxiety. Or indigestion.

As a nation, we are emotionally struggling to digest each day’s dour economic news. Record home foreclosure filings — more than 2 million January through August. The stock market’s Dow Jones industrial average down 18.4 percent this year. Retirement and college savings crumbling. Then there’s that looming $700 billion bailout for the financial industry.

“The feeling of self-failure is tremendous,” says Levy, a family physician for 28 years. “Some people feel that at least if they have a real heart attack or stroke, they have a good excuse not to bring money home.”

The credit crisis of recent weeks — and economic decline of recent months — is pitting clients against brokers or financial advisers. It’s making workers feel insecure in their jobs. And it often leads to quarrels among spouses with different views over how to handle their finances.

Unlike many other forms of stress — such as an upcoming presentation at work or a visit from the in-laws — financial stress doesn’t go away quickly.

Often, a plummeting portfolio or free-falling 401(k) results in behavior that touches an entire family. Fewer family treats. Less family time. And that inner inkling to turn to vices.

“We’ve never had this much activity, not even after 9/11,” says Ann Clark, CEO at ACI Specialty Benefits, a national employee counseling service. “Everyone is asking for help.”

Calls for financial-related consulting to the company are up 85 percent compared with this time last year, Clark says. Until last week, holiday stress was to be the topic of the pamphlets, brochures, newsletters, Internet seminars and podcasts the company planned for October. That plan has been scrapped for a series of new material: Coping During Difficult Financial Times.

“People don’t want to hear about the holidays,” Clark says.

USA TODAY talked with readers about how they’re coping. We asked psychologists, counselors and family doctors what people should do to rise emotionally above the flood of depressing news.

“The dream is gone,” says Steven Berglas, an executive coach and graduate business professor at the University of California-Los Angeles. “Hope has been taken away.”

Few know that better than Rick Shultz, who oversees leasing at a General Motors dealership in Medina, Ohio. The 55-year-old and his wife, Denise, semi-retired a few years ago to a dream home they designed and built by a golf course. Shultz was forced to return to work this year after his investment portfolio hit the skids.

On Sunday, over a breakfast of sausage and gravy, Shultz and his wife made the toughest decision of all: to put their dream home up for sale and move somewhere less expensive.

It was the retirement home they’d designed together. It’s 50 steps from the 10th green at the Fox Meadow Country Club and has nearly 20-foot cathedral ceilings. There are speakers in every room, so music carries throughout the house. There’s a hot tub adjacent to the master bedroom.

“We cried over it,” says Shultz, who admits he cried the most. “It was a very emotional decision.”

Since the Wall Street meltdown, emotion seems to be playing a big role in many financial and non-financial decisions by USA TODAY readers:

•Landscaper Thomas Tilden of Auburn, Pa., was mowing a lawn last week when he got a frantic phone call from his 80-year-old mother. She had most of her savings in a Merrill Lynch brokerage account and feared it was about to disappear.

“It took a good 20 to 25 minutes for me to calm her down,” recalls Tilden, who assured his mom that the brokerage with her money wasn’t disappearing but being merged into Bank of America.

Before the call, his mom was so upset, Tilden says, “She went to the bank and took a bunch of money out, just in case.”

•During a recent Wednesday night poker game, Tim Baer was asked how he felt about his life.

The information technology sales specialist from Alexandria, Va., recalls he ducked the question, in part because the economy has him so worried. Baer and his wife, Wendy, have good jobs with hearty paychecks. But, he says, “What’s worrying me is that I’m not doing enough. I feel powerless.”

So much so, he says, he has an “irrational fear” that some day all their money will be gone and they’ll be living out of a cardboard box.

“I’d feel great about my life if not for this stuff going on in the market,” Baer says. “It’s zapping my energy.”

•For Air Force retirees Barb and Scott Ellestad and others in their community in Mesquite, Nev., the financial meltdown has changed the way they socialize.

Several friends of the Ellestads who live in their retirement community have pulled back from getting together in recent weeks as their stock portfolios have shrunk. Friends who used to go out with the Ellestads three times a week now join them once — or not at all.

“They’re isolating themselves because they’ve lost so much money in stocks,” Barb Ellestad says. To help maintain the friendships, the Ellestads host more dinners at their house.

•Tonya Macklin is a single mom in the Boston area who works two jobs, seven days a week. She lost her home last year when she no longer could afford the payments and filed for bankruptcy protection. Shortly after, she was hospitalized for seven days for exhaustion. “That was really hard on my daughter,” Macklin says of her 10-year-old, Jade Ashley Brooks.

Macklin has trouble sleeping at night. “I just put it in God’s hands. I go to bed praying each night that things will someday get better.”