After announcing he was going to quit, Burns took three months off, came back for six months, left for a two-year ‘sabbatical’, and then went back to work.
Never, in all this time, did Burns consult a doctor about his stressful life, and neither did any doctor ask him about his mental health.
Never did he admit any weakness to his colleagues. He knew what would happen if he did. “It was a blokey industry where you didn’t admit to anything,” he says. “At the slightest sign of weakness, people would shaft you, saying behind your back, ‘Oh, Burnsie’s got problems’. It is the most testosterone-driven industry there is.”
Amazingly, it was 1997 before Burns suffered his first episode of paralysing anxiety. “I went off the rails. I was having anxiety attacks. I couldn’t sit down. I just couldn’t think straight. My wife and I broke up for six months and it was all my fault. While I was alone, I went to hospital thinking I had had a heart attack. It was a panic attack.”
Astonishingly, the hospital did not follow up his condition: no referral to a psychiatrist or psychologist, no medication – nothing.
Burns’ wife counselled him to see a doctor about his mental state, but he thought she simply didn’t understand. He hated the company he was working for at the time – which he declines to name – for its empty, conflict-ridden corporate culture.
Burns’ anxiety lasted nine months before he found what he thought was a solution – a new job. He held himself together for several more years, then announced his retirement.
Burns quit without consulting his wife, and was astonished to find she didn’t want to spend all day every day with him (the couple do not have children). “Over the past 35 years, she has created her own life. Her parents were very ill. I had no idea how much time she was spending with them. She didn’t want me there – I was disrupting her life.”
Burns had talked so bitterly about his life in stockbroking before he left that his colleagues abandoned him en masse once he was out the door.
This time, Burns was not anxious, but depressed. When he wasn’t not actually crying, he was close to tears, lonely, and unclear about what to do. This time, when his wife told him to go a doctor, he followed her advice.
His GP referred him to psychologist Simon Kinsella, whose practice already had a brisk trade in burned-out executives. In weekly sessions, Burns began talking – and frequently crying – as he began to realise “what I had put my wife through”.
Over the course of the next year, Burns got back on his feet. “It was very confronting and very uncomfortable, but it made me understand myself, and why I was so obsessive.”
In a sobering moment of fearless honesty, Burns tells LeadingCompany: “If it was not for that, I probably would have taken my life.”
Burns has taken up golf and painting, but he also has another passion: a new company formed with Kinsella recently – long after his treatment finished – to help executives identify if they are risking depression. The Institute of Performance and Wellbeing provides executives with a “check up from the neck up” to prevent them getting to the point where they have to step down.
“What people don’t understand is that once you reach the point of no return, you don’t get rid of it; you have to manage it,” says Burns. “You have to identify the trigger points.”
Executives, especially men, are very good at covering stress, anxiety and depression in their workplaces, he says. “But when you walk out the office door, the people who cop it are your family.”
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