By Julia Kagan, Investopedia.
A wealth psychologist is a mental health professional who specializes in issues relating specifically to wealthy individuals. Wealth psychologists are also called money psychologists or wealth counselors. Wealth psychologists help their ultra-rich clients deal with issues such as the guilt they feel about being wealthy, or advise on inheritance issues and counsel parents on how to raise children who are not spoiled by money.
Wealth psychologists assist many modern wealthy families, most of which built their wealth in one generation. They may not be comfortable with all aspects of being rich, and may have a lot of guilt associated with it. Even for those people who find themselves financially prepared, more are beginning to realize they may not be psychologically or emotionally prepared to cope with wealth.
Financial planning that emphasized the quantitative side of life has given way to a practice intended to broaden the scope and clarity of one’s vision of the future, and the values that drive the commitment to living a full and complete life. Expectations of longer lives, uncertainty over a frail economy, fear of market risk, disillusionment with government and concerns over world chaos are contributing factors to new attitudes about money and happiness.
Wealth psychology is becoming more prominent in legacy planning, preparing family members and future generations for the emotional transfer of wealth.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/w/wealthpsychologist.asp
Sudden Wealth Syndrome (SWS): Definition, Causes, and Treatment.
Sudden wealth syndrome (SWS) is a type of distress that afflicts individuals who suddenly come into large sums of money. Becoming suddenly wealthy can cause people to make decisions they might not have otherwise made. Sudden wealth syndrome symptoms include feeling isolated from former friends, feeling guilty about their good fortune, and extreme fear of losing their money.
(SWS)
Sudden wealth syndrome is not an actual psychological diagnosis. It was originally coined by therapists who work patients who have become suddenly wealthy.
Individuals with Sudden Wealth Syndrome may have acquired their wealth through a lottery win, become rich trading cryptocurrency like bitcoin, or received a large inheritance. Many people afflicted with Sudden Wealth Syndrome deal with an identity crisis because they transition from surviving on a meager weekly, fortnightly, or monthly salary to becoming a wealthy and privileged individual.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Sudden Wealth Syndrome (SDS) refers to a psychological condition or an identity crisis in individuals who have become suddenly wealthy.
- Sudden Wealth Syndrome is characterized by isolation from former friends, guilt over their change in circumstances, and extreme fear of losing their money.
- Individuals can avoid Sudden Wealth Syndrome by planning ahead to ensure that their wealth is spent wisely, avoiding making quick decisions about how to spend their money, and maintaining discretion about their sudden influx of money.
- https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/suddenwealthsyndrome.asp
The rich are different: Unravelling the perceived and self-reported personality profiles of high-net-worth individuals. Beyond money and possessions, how are the rich different from the general population?
Investigating the broad personality traits of the Big Five and the more specific traits of narcissism and locus of control, we find that stereotypes about wealthy people’s personality are accurate albeit somewhat exaggerated and that wealthy people can be characterized as stable, flexible, and agentic individuals who are focused more on themselves than on others.
https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjop.12360
Related Reading
Inside the brain of the billionaire visionary: narcissism, risk, and disordered personality traits. Frederick Kaufman
These are questions that have stumped scientists from various disciplines for many years—after all, today’s crop of very rich guys (and they are mostly guys) are hardly the first to exhibit puzzling behavior, sometimes appearing to tip into mental illness.
Probing the origins of these impulses has been the purview of psychology and neurology. There are wealth psychologists to analyze the super rich and help them deal with their guilt and angst. Neuroeconomics, meanwhile, attempts to take Freud and Jung a step further by combining neuroscience, cognitive science, behavioral science, and social psychology to lay bare the inner workings of the billionaire’s mind.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously noted that the rich are “different from you and me.”
And indeed, some of the recent antics of the super-rich have been… sure, let’s call it “different.”
There’s the extreme risk-taking: billionaires jettisoning themselves into space, careening around in race cars, or plunging themselves into the darkest depths of the sea on questionable sightseeing tours.
What makes a person with the savvy to amass such a spectacular fortune so erratic? Is there something about that pile of millions or billions that drives a person to distraction? Or is anyone with the guts and creativity to make billions just more likely to be a little strange in the first place?
These are questions that have stumped scientists from various disciplines for many years—after all, today’s crop of very rich guys (and they are mostly guys) are hardly the first to exhibit puzzling behavior, sometimes appearing to tip into mental illness . Filthy rich monarchs from England’s George III to the Roman emperor Caligula were widely considered “mad.”
Probing the origins of these impulses has been the purview of psychology and neurology. There are wealth psychologists to analyze the super rich and help them deal with their guilt and angst. Neuroeconomics, meanwhile, attempts to take Freud and Jung a step further by combining neuroscience, cognitive science, behavioral science, and social psychology to lay bare the inner workings of the billionaire’s mind.
Did we really need a professional to tell us that those worth more than $25 million are “focused more on themselves than on others”?
Does it come as a surprise that the super-rich may struggle to feel empathy toward groups outside their inner circle—such as the legions of workers that create their wealth?
It should not, perhaps, shock anyone that the self-made billionaire may possess an extra shot of narcissism, that they like to be in control, or that they are extremely competitive. The field’s conclusions could be summed up by the famous non-scientist Bernie Sanders, when he observed that billionaires have “psychiatric issues.”
But when it comes to explaining the strange behavior of some of these ultra-high-net-worth individuals, the best that all this shrinkage has been able to come up with is a rather un-startling set of observations.
Did we really need a professional to tell us that those worth more than $25 million are “focused more on themselves than on others”?
Does it come as a surprise that the super-rich may struggle to feel empathy toward groups outside their inner circle—such as the legions of workers that create their wealth?
It should not, perhaps, shock anyone that the self-made billionaire may possess an extra shot of narcissism, that they like to be in control, or that they are extremely competitive. The field’s conclusions could be summed up by the famous non-scientist Bernie Sanders, when he observed that billionaires have “psychiatric issues.”
It’s easy to mock, to break out the world’s tiniest violin for the problems of the top tenth of the 1%. But as the lives of the super-rich have increasingly veered into extremes, so have their problems.
The adage that “money can’t buy happiness” has proved tragically true for the gilded victims of what has come to be known as “Sudden Wealth Syndrome”—who suffer from irritability, insomnia, paranoia, depression, anxiety, and panic attacks.
That may be a part of why so many soothe their reeling brains with ketamine, self-medicate with psilocybin, or submit to an unwavering diet of blueberries between dunks in an ice bath.
Part of the problem, unhappy multimillionaires told researchers from Boston College’s Center of Wealth and Philanthropy in a 2011 psychological study, is the feeling that no amount of wealth feels like enough.
There’s never a point where one can stop craving more. The study’s 1,000 respondents, each worth at least $25 million, described feelings of anxiety, dissatisfaction, and—perplexingly—financial insecurity..
The central question unanswered: Why are so many extremely rich people miserable, and why do they act so strangely?
Lately another scholarly genre, genoeconomics, has risen to attempt to answer the question using the trove of genetic information that has become available since the end of last century, when the human genome was first mapped.
Research has shown some correlation between educational attainment (seen as a proxy for likelihood to get rich) and a predisposition to schizophrenia, autism, anxiety disorders, and other conditions.
Read Full Article :https://finance.yahoo.com/news/brain-science-wealthy-weirdness-103000314.html
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