Debt causing anxiety, survey reveals
MONEY: A British Columbia insolvency trustee’s results find high levels of stress among respondents
For Terrence Morrissey, being in debt took a constant mental toll.
“It robbed me of my piece of mind, robbed me of my dignity,” said Morrissey, of Langley. He didn’t want anyone to find out: “What a failure I am.”
He’s not alone. A survey by a British Columbia insolvency trustee found high levels of anxiety, stress and even suicidal thoughts among debt-ridden respondents.
Sands and Associates found that debt was constant worry for almost two-thirds of contacts it surveyed.
“You have this little fear all the time,” Morrissey said.
Morrissey, a retired security officer, a former longtime manager with Hertz Rent a Car and a self-published author, found himself with about $70,000 in consumer debts at age 79 through admitted misspending with credit cards.
And while Morrissey wasn’t clinically diagnosed with a mental illness, the Sands & Associates survey found that 28 per cent of respondents had suffered from diagnosed depression, which was contributed to debt worries, and 18 per cent said debt pushed them to dark thoughts of suicide.
“I had an idea but I didn’t know it was that severe, the non-financial impact of debt,” said Blair Mantin, a partner in Sands and Associates and a licensed insolvency trustee.
“The suicide metric was absolutely sobering,” Mantin said of the survey results. In 10 years of insolvency work, he had only occasionally dealt with clients who confided they’d thought of harming themselves.
“I thought, ‘That’s the exception, it can’t be a significant part of our client base,’ ” Mantin said. “But no, it’s between one in five or one in six.”
The survey, conducted among 1,300 British Columbians, is a limited snapshot of people that have been in touch with Sands and Associates over debt troubles, mostly clients. However, Mantin said he believes it speaks to broader anxieties about debt.
“It’s probably less than 10 per cent of the population who will have to do a bankruptcy or consumer proposal,” Mantin said. “But I’d say it’s a very high proportion of people who will feel some stress in their life, to a varying degree.”
Mantin said Sands and Associates hopes its latest survey gets people talking about resolving their debt with less stigma.
Morrissey declared bankruptcy, and not for the first time. He said the lesson in his story is not to ignore debt problems and get help sooner rather than later, because it can lift tremendous psychological weight.
“Take control of it, stop spending it, pay it off and move on,” Morrissey said.