Same Symptoms, Different Disease

A private mental health clinic near London's taxpayers' money absorption district reports an increase of one-third in the number of financial service providers seeking help for anxiety, depression and stress over the last three months. There has also been a twenty-seven per cent rise in inquiries about the clinic's programmes for dealing with eating disorders, and a thirty per cent rise in those seeking help for drug and alcohol addiction, "often the result, says the clinic's medical director, of recreational drug use tipping into full-blown dependence during times of stress", rather than mere shiftlessness and hypochondria as happens so often with the poor folks. "We're seeing 25-year-old bankers waking up with acute anxiety and stress, and realising that the job they thought they had for life and the bonuses they had come to rely on had literally disappeared overnight," said the clinic's medical director, William Shanahan; a pity so few people these days are able to work hard and adapt to change. According to Shanahan, there is still not enough recognition of the mental health problems faced by those in high-pressure jobs; perhaps because such problems bear a deceptive resemblance to what is usually diagnosed as scrounging in lesser beings.