Ticker Shock Strikes Techies
wired.com
When tech stocks started to plummet last Monday, Stephen Goldbart expected panicked phone calls. He got them, all right. But the callers weren't screaming, "Sell." They were begging, "Help."
For Goldbart, a clinical psychologist who works with clients from Silicon Valley, the Nasdaq has become an increasingly accurate barometer of prevailing emotional duress. With so many thousands of tech workers' dreams and demons handcuffed to the market by the golden promise of stock options, the market's mad swings have become their own, he says.
"People come in, and they're suffering so much from the anxiety of it all they can't even work," says Goldbart, 46, co-director of the Money, Meaning, and Choices Institute in Kentfield, California. The malady has become so common, he coined an informal new name for it: ticker shock.
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