Psychologist: Very wealthy people could benefit from care

Psychologist: Very wealthy people could benefit from care
(May 2009 Issue)

Even during the best financial times, it would be hard to drum up sympathy for the very rich. If only we had their problems, most of us would say. But dealing with vast wealth, especially sudden wealth, comes with its own set of issues. From feelings of isolation to guilt to paranoia over who can be trusted, there are roadblocks that the wealthy deal with that most of us never face.

While there are professionals who can help manage their money or advise on life planning, these issues would better be handled by a mental health professional. It's an area in psychology that has not been closely studied, according to Karen Weisgerber, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in Newton, Mass., who recently spoke with New England Psychologist's Catherine Robertson Souter about her work.

Weisgerber has found herself, through the twists and turns life has taken, dealing with a number of very wealthy clients. It's a field, she says, that could benefit from psychology, rather than letting financial planners attempt to deal with sibling rivalry, depression, guilt or isolation that the wealthy face.

Q: You don't like to use the term wealth counselor. How do you describe what you do?
A: I am a licensed psychologist who specializes in issues of wealth and its impact on identity and development.

Q: Wealth is a relative term.
A: I would say the kind I'm talking about is where work is really supplemental. They can go through life unimpacted by the daily vagaries of working and drudgery.

For a number of patients, sudden wealth, from inheritance or other means, has had a profound effect on where they feel their place is in the world, what they feel the meaning of work or love will be. Traditional markers of psychological health and development are the ability to engage in work and the ability to love. For people who feel they are being judged because of net worth, those things are complicated.

Q: What are some of the issues?
A: There can be issues with integrating wealth into your personality - which means having it be a piece of who you are as opposed to defining who you are. There are general issues of trust - who can I tell, who can I trust? It can impact social relationships in different developmental stages. With courting and marriage, in the case of inherited wealth, there is typically a lot more familial involvement than with the typical relationship.

With sudden wealth, a lot of these folks have been bought out of a company and they are sitting on millions of dollars. Yet, they are still friends with the guy who took the other job and never made this kind of money. There are a lot of questions about friends, who can be openly jealous when they started at the same place, graduated from the same schools, started at the same kind of companies and one makes it and one doesn't. There can be a lot of survivor guilt.

Q: Do people talk about using charitable donations as a way to help themselves not have that guilt? Do they feel they need to save their friends who have lost their jobs?
A: Philanthropy is typically a big piece of what people end up dong - at the very least because they are advised to from a tax point of view. I do find that those who handle this situation better are those who have been able to find a meaning in philanthropy and are not just doing it as a tax write off.

With family and friends, that's different. They have a feeling that they need to help everyone but it is hard to do it in a way that is both helpful to the other person and helpful to your relationship with them.

Q: If I had a sister who was on welfare, a single mom with a kid and I had six million dollars, why should I not give her half? But then on the other side, why should I? What has she done to earn it?
A: Right. My work is not so much talking about the money as what this has brought up.

In the therapy world, you don't give a session away for free because it means something to a patient to pay even five dollars for it, the exchange of money. So, in this kind of situation, if you are going to give to your sister who is on welfare, should she pay you back at all? It's sort of ludicrous if you have $5 million left. I know a situation where this exact thing happened and, while it helped the sibling, it also created a sense of permanent indebtedness that the sibling can't get herself out of. The sibling is dealing with the sense that once again her sister has shown her up and "she is better than I am and I am just a screw-up."

I find that people tend to want to be generous but it's not as easy as writing a check. I think the public would say, "Jeez, just give them the money they need!" That's fine, but it doesn't end when you do that. Typically, there is not a lot of sympathy for people who have money. It's like "cry me a river you poor thing. I wish I had your troubles."

Q: Right. Even talking with you about it, I'm thinking "I'll take it."
A: And let me tell you, with therapists too. Some people will say that even their therapist becomes jealous of them.

Q: Even though you don't use the term "wealth counselor," there are other people who do call themselves that.
A: It's become a really big industry in the financial and estate planning world. There are numerous people who market themselves as family dynamic specialists. There are certainly no credentials for this, it cuts across many disciplines.

Depending on the intuitive skills of the person doing it, you can get yourself into some complicated discussions pretty quickly. You can have a financial planner working with a family who has come into money and now their teenage kid is spending too much and getting into drugs. Is the financial planner having that conversation with the family as opposed to a psychologist?

At the other end of the spectrum, some financial planning firms or estate planning groups are partnering up with psychologists to help them.

Q: What would you say to psychologists who don't see this as an important field in which, in a social sense, to spend their time?
A: When colleagues say the wealthy don't need my help - in the psychological sense - they are wrong, but also you have to look at the impact socially. If you look at people who have significant wealth, like 20, 30, 50 or 100 million dollars, the impact they can have on the world is so profound. They do often get involved in charitable giving and do things that change many lives. The social impact of dealing with one client can be very profound. I still do low fee work where you can help a person and that person can be changed and they may impact another person or a child in their lives. In this work, that one person can develop a foundation that can change the course of hundreds of kids. It's an impact we've underestimated.