Mourning Our Money at SmartMoney.com

Mourning Our Money at SmartMoney.com: "Mourning Our Money
After last year’s market meltdown wiped away huge chunks of their savings, more investors have decided to seek professional help. Just not from a financial advisor.
Manhattan grief counselor Diana Nash, for one, typically sees clients who are struggling with the loss of someone close—a parent, a child, a spouse. But lately, she’s taken on a handful of clients who want help dealing with a different kind of loss: their gutted retirement account. Though months have passed since the market meltdown, they still can’t deal with the fact that their nest egg is fried. “Some of them can’t get out of bed,” says Nash.

In some cases employers are footing the bill. Ken LeBeau, director of employee-assistance programs for health care giant Cigna, says that since last fall, call volume grew 25 percent thanks to all the folks grappling with financial fears, while calls seeking immediate counseling rose 60 percent. “The sense of urgency increased dramatically,” he says. We all feel it to some degree. Unless you were already broke when the markets started crashing last fall, the economy has probably subjected you to a tiresome parade of unpleasant feelings.
In fact, the stages of grief, first identified by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross to describe the experiences of the terminally ill, apply rather neatly to folks who suffer major market losses. There’s the denial: refusing to open your account statement. Then there’s the anger, which explains the ongoing national temper tantrum aimed at targets like AIG and Bernie Madoff. And who among us hasn’t done a little mental bargaining? So maybe we won’t see the Dow at 14000 again in our lifetime—we’ll settle for keeping our"