Sean Murphy knows most people in America would have a hard time feeling sorry for him. He's 26, good-looking, and in great shape. In his best year, he brought home seven figures. But he's also a Wall Street stockbroker―and to many of his clients who got burned in the meltdown, "now I'm scum." Murphy says the phone calls from angry clients and a paycheck that has shrunk 80% are hardly the worst of it. One of his broker friends tried to kill himself this year. Another put himself in rehab. And he can't count the number of former hotshot colleagues who have decamped from luxurious Upper West Side bachelor pads to bunk with roommates in working-class Queens, toiling at $8-an-hour retail jobs. "Two years ago, these guys were incredible optimists, but they have less faith in the system now," says Bonnie Jacobson, a Manhattan psychologist whose practice has catered to Wall Street clients for three decades. "The chaos is making them feel very shaky."
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