One Out Of Every Ten Wall Street Employees Is A Psychopath, Say Researchers

I had read once that salespeople tend to suffer from ADD and that Attention Deficit Disorder actually helps them be people-persons and easily influence others in their sales environment, but this is absolutely shocking!

This is not a cynical blog calling Wall Street workers psychopaths, this is the result of research by psychological and social professionals, peer-reviewed and published by the Huffington Post. Here are excerpts from the article:

A clinical psychopath is bright, gregarious and charming, writes DeCovny. He lies easily and often, and may have trouble feeling empathy for other people. He's probably also more willing to take dangerous risks -- either because he doesn't understand the consequences, or because he simply doesn't care.

An appetite for risk can seem like a positive business trait on Wall Street, where big gambles sometimes lead to big rewards ...

At the same time, the fast-moving, high-pressure environment of Wall Street probably compromises the mental health of some of its employees. A recent study found that many young bankers develop alcoholism, insomnia, eating disorders and other stress-related ailments within just a few years on the job.

Stockbrokers have also been shown to experience clinical depression at a rate more than three times as high as the general population.

DeCovny writes that for someone with a "latent" compulsive gambling problem, a job trading stocks can trigger pathological responses that send the person into an escalating pattern of lies, debts and even embezzlement and fraud.