First his fingers, forearms and toes tingled; then he was gripped by a mental paralysis. “I couldn’t think about how to make a decision,” says the banking executive in his mid-forties. “I completely froze. I felt my IQ had dropped 50 points.” The trigger for his anxiety, he says, was unrealistic work demands. “Not making decisions made it worse as I was then not performing.”
Yet this City worker , who prefers not to be named, tried to conceal his anxiety because he feared his employer would think he was not cut out for the job. The prevailing culture at his office was to keep your head down, work hard, admit no weakness. He wanted to be seen as efficient and resilient. People noticed that his work — rather than his mental health — was suffering. “Given that I have always been pretty much the ‘golden boy’, when my boss took me to task I imploded.”
Plagued by a fear that he was a fraud he considered suicide. That was in 2014.