The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

by John Coates

Data on the financial industry is sparse, but private health insurance companies throughout the United States and the United Kingdom reported a surge in claims for peptic ulcers, stress and depression after the credit crisis began in the autumn of 2007. In July 2008, for example, British United Provident Association Ltd., the United Kingdom’s largest private health insurer, reported that the number of employees from financial institutions seeking treatment for stress and depression had risen 47 percent from a year earlier. The World Health Organization also warned about the rise of mental-health problems and suicide with the advent of the credit crisis and the subsequent recession. Recently, a few years after the event, we are starting to get hard epidemiological data on the fallout from the credit crisis. One study has found that during 2007–9 there was a spike in the rate of heart attacks in London, and this occurred against a backdrop of a decreasing incidence of heart attacks in the rest of the UK. The authors estimate that this surge in heart attacks in London led to an additional two thousand deaths, and resulted, they suggest, from the impact of the credit crisis on the financial district. A market crash may thus produce not only an economic disaster but also a medical one. In the myriad ways described here, the stress response, as it builds and ramifies over the course of weeks and months, worsens the credit crisis. The bodily response initiated to handle the stres...