Not long after covid-19 forced Patty Fiore to move her therapy practice to Zoom, she started noticing a new affliction. Her new clients, many of whom were from San Francisco, described to her how the crypto industry was wrecking their mental health. Crypto’s wild ride, Fiore said, was affecting their psyche. “‘Should I have sold it at a higher price?’ ‘Should I have done it two months ago?’ All these questions were cropping up, along with regret, depression, and anxiety.”
Over the past five years, as cryptocurrencies have scaled new heights—and fallen from them—psychologists and therapists have stumbled upon a burgeoning new field of study. Many crypto traders exhibit behaviors that recall other forms of addiction—to alcohol, say, or gambling—but that also bear the unique stresses of this particular market. Fiore has been particularly well-placed to recognize this phenomenon, because she’s a crypto trader herself.
Through the pandemic, even as the prices of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies rose, Fiore kept receiving new clients linked in some way with the industry: traders as well as employees of crypto companies. Since December, though, as the values of many cryptocurrencies have dropped—with bitcoin, the most prominent, tumbling from nearly $68,000 to a late January low of around $35,000—the number of inquiries for Fiore’s services jumped. Most of the dozen-odd clients she sees regularly for crypto-related issues have found her in the last two months. “Some of these are new clients, and some are people who weren’t into crypto when they first came to me but who invested last year,” she said.
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