Read the whole thing at: Bloomberg.com

“We get lots of CEOs of companies, traders, high-end business guys,” says Managing Director Brendan Quinn. “They want treatment, but they want it to be discreet.”

Financial services firms in the U.K. are trying to break the stigma of mental illness as the number of people seeking help increases. JPMorgan Cazenove Ltd. and Herbert Smith LLP sponsored a conference yesterday where employers were urged to do more to help workers with psychological problems and recognize they can still be productive.

Mental health is a growing concern as the credit crunch adds to stress in the City of London, the U.K. capital’s financial district. The number of men in the City who sought help for depression and stress rose 47 percent from a year earlier in the past three months, according to British United Provident Association Ltd., the U.K.’s largest private health insurer.

Busy Summer

About 40,000 people in the U.K. financial industry will lose their jobs during the next three years, according to Experian Group Ltd, with London bearing the brunt.

“I’m getting three times as many referrals as I was a year ago, particularly from the corporate sector, and a lot of that’s related to the financial crisis,” says Bennedict Cannon, a London psychotherapist. “This has been the busiest early summer I’ve known in 10 years.”

Don Serratt, chief executive officer of Lifeworks, a private treatment facility set in the countryside at Old Woking, southwest of London, says he saw a 20 percent increase in admissions of City workers in the first six months of the year compared with the same period in 2007.

“What happens in these environments becomes so unbearable when times are bad because everyone’s really frightened that they’re next and they’re going to lose their job,” says Serratt, who was the London-based head of European mergers and acquisitions for Creditanstalt Bank until 1998. He quit after a battle with addictions and severe clinical depression, which he says were exacerbated by the City’s environment.

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