With the news going from bad to worse on Wall Street, employees of some of the financial industry's giants are likely experiencing an emotional state that's unusual to them--complete and utter uncertainty about their futures.
The Lehman Brothers (nyse: LEH - news - people ) bankruptcy filing and the sale of Merrill Lynch (nyse: MER - news - people ) to Bank of America (nyse: BAC - news - people ) this past weekend put in jeopardy the jobs of a combined 85,000 employees. That's in addition to some 9,000 workers reportedly let go by Bear Stearns after it was acquired by JPMorgan Chase (nyse: JPM - news - people ) in March. While the credit crisis has been taking its toll on the U.S. economy for more than a year, many employees of these now-stumbling institutions have been caught by surprise and are facing the shock of losing their stock value as well as their livelihood.
"Employees and the public had the expectation, like with the Titanic, that you didn't have to worry about these firms," says Maurice Elvekrog, a management psychologist and chairman of the Bloomfield Hills, Mich.-based personal money-management company Seger-Elvekrog. "It's not that people are worried about starving or something, but they just don't know what's going to happen."
As a result, calls to company employee-assistance programs having been slightly rising, says Marina London, manager of Internet services for the Employee Assistance Professionals Association.