John Hughes in his son Thomas’s bedroom in the family home. Credit:Damon Winter "She just didn't understand how this possibly could be on this particular day," John Hughes said. Less than two months later, on the morning of May 28, a Thursday, Thomas Hughes stepped onto the stone windowsill of his 24th-floor rental apartment on the southern tip of Manhattan and jumped to his death. He had been up all night, on an alcohol- and cocaine-filled binge, as best as can be determined by the police, whose report indicated that Hughes appeared to have been drinking heavily and that there were signs of cocaine use. The medical examiner has not yet released his toxicology report, but police ruled the death a suicide. Since Hughes did not leave a note, no one can be certain what he was thinking. His father refuses to believe that his son committed suicide, despite the police report. He suspects that his son's death was related to the stress he was under at work and that he used cocaine in a misguided effort to re-energise himself for the workday after a night of heavy drinking. And the combination of the alcohol and drugs made him crazy. 'When somebody commits suicide, it's not because they were working too hard'

There is no simple answer to what leads a person to take his own life. Depression, drugs, mental illness, despair over circumstances one feels powerless to change - all of these can conspire. And there is no evidence that the incidence of suicide by young professionals on Wall Street is higher than in any other industry. John Hughes holds a portrait of his son Thomas, a Wall Street banker who committed suicide in May. Credit:Damon Winter "When somebody commits suicide, it's not because they were working too hard," said one senior Wall Street executive. But Thomas Hughes died at a time when sensitivities about the pressures of Wall Street on young professionals are acute. Just a month earlier, Sarvshreshth Gupta, a 22-year-old first-year banking analyst at Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, committed suicide after a particularly stressful stretch at work. Around that time, another Goldman first-year analyst in the health care group who had worked 72 hours straight was hospitalised after having a seizure. (Goldman declined to comment about either episode.) Two years before, Moritz Erhardt, a 21-year-old investment banking intern at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, died after having an epileptic seizure while he was taking a shower to prepare to return to the office after working the previous 72 hours without sleeping. Altucher's fortunes fell after the global financial crisis in 2008. Credit:AP

Wall Street has always been a very demanding place to work, but these episodes, whether related to overwork or not, seem to have crystallised a larger need for change. In recent years, Wall Street has been searching to provide a better work-life balance for its junior bankers. These efforts have not been entirely successful. Even as Wall Street banks are losing top talent to Silicon Valley, hedge funds and private equity firms, long hours are simply part of the job. Wall Street's culture still attracts hyperambitious men and women who are willing to do whatever it takes - pulling consecutive all-nighters or working through holiday weekends - to differentiate themselves and to meet their bosses' weighty expectations. "They are doing it to themselves willingly because the competition is so fierce and anything they can do to stand out they are going to do," said Kevin Roose, the author of "Young Money," a 2014 book about young Wall Street bankers. "You can't really stand out because most of what you're doing does not require original thinking. So the only way you can distinguish yourself is by sheer endurance. Gluttons for punishment are rewarded on Wall Street, especially at the young levels." Trump once called the dean of New York bankers, JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon, "the worst banker in the United States". Credit:Laura McDermott The banks, nonetheless, are taking action. In June, Goldman introduced a policy for the 2,900 undergraduate summer interns in investment banking: Leave the office before midnight each day. No more all-nighters. "The policy is consistent with our goal of providing each intern with a challenging and meaningful experience," said Michael DuVally, a Goldman spokesman.

As for its full-time junior bankers, Goldman tells them to stay out of the office from 9 p.m. Friday to 9 a.m. Sunday. It closely monitors violations; only senior partners are allowed to authorise exceptions, and generally just for deals that need to be completed before the markets open on a Monday morning. Of the 1,500 analysts and associates in Goldman's investment banking business, 15 or 20 at a time are permitted to work through the weekend. Other firms have instituted their own version of these rules. Barclays forbids analysts to work more than 12 days in a row. JPMorgan Chase has given analysts the option of having one "protected weekend" each month - meaning no work on Saturday or Sunday - as long as it is scheduled in advance. After Erhardt's death, Bank of America put in place measures to improve supervision and ensure that its employees take off a minimum of four weekend days a month. Only on Wall Street, or perhaps in the equally competitive confines of Silicon Valley, could these kinds of guardrails begin to make sense. And the new workday boundaries are coming as mergers and acquisitions, and other deal-related activity, are on pace for a record year. It's all a bit in flux, especially since the work still must get done and Wall Street resists hiring more people - its biggest expense - for as long as it can. Morgan Stanley, for instance, has made no firm rules for its junior bankers. "I'm not sure that's the right answer because I'm not sure how you stop work if there's a deal on," James P. Gorman, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, told Bloomberg Television last year.

Yet in July, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, appeared to take a different tack. In a speech to a group of young Wall Street bankers and traders, Dimon, who is recovering from throat cancer and whose partner, the deal mogul Jimmy Lee, died suddenly in June at 62, took a paternal tone in discussing work-life balance. "You've got to take care of your mind, your body, your spirit, your soul, your health," he said. "JPMorgan can't do it for you, or wherever you work." If you neglect those things, he said, "You'll destroy your personal relationships. You'll destroy your life. You won't be healthy. You won't enjoy it." Relentless and rewarding Moelis & Co., founded in 2007 by the longtime investment banker Ken Moelis, has a reputation for being a demanding place to work, in large part because its main business - advising on mergers and acquisitions - can be grueling, especially in the weeks before the announcement of a deal, when financial and legal terms and conditions must be negotiated. According to some of the anonymous comments about the working conditions at Moelis, found on the website Glassdoor.com, it's not a place for the faint of heart. "Expected to work obnoxious hours even by banking standards," wrote one full-time employee in May who nevertheless likes the place.

And Moelis himself is a man in a hurry. Moelis went public in 2014, just seven years after its founding. Moelis owns nearly $US1 billion worth of stock in his company. According to John Hughes, his son Thomas generally liked his job at Moelis, relentless hours aside, and found the work rewarding and stimulating. To make up for his absence at the Easter brunch, Thomas Hughes had planned a short vacation to Bermuda. After a few work-related postponements, he finally made it to the island on Thursday, May 21. He stayed until Sunday but never was able to play golf or visit the beach. He ended up stuck in his room working on his computer. Early the next week, he headed to Cleveland for work-related meetings. He returned to New York on the night of May 27 and apparently went out drinking. Around 2 am, the doorman let him into Ocean Luxury Residences, at 1 West St., where he lived. Hughes had struggled with substance abuse since high school; he was kicked out of Taft, the boarding school, for using cocaine, his father said. After entering a rehabilitation program, Hughes transferred to Canterbury School and started to excel academically, his father said. At Northwestern University, he had lots of friends, was a member of the squash team and majored in economics. He was especially gregarious. "He was kind of a big presence kind of a guy," John Hughes said. "You noticed when he came in the room."

Finance was the Hughes family business. After a three-year stint on Wall Street, John took Hughes over his father's small bank - Sleepy Hollow Bancorp - in 1986, and sold it to Tompkins Financial Corporation in 2008, before the onset of the financial crisis, for $US30.2 million. So it was not surprising that Thomas Hughes was interested in finance. During college, Thomas Hughes had internships at JPMorgan Chase and Ameriprise Financial. He graduated, in 2009, into a terrible job market but managed to get hired at Duff & Phelps, a boutique advisory firm, doing valuations and appraisals for small deals. Restless for big-time Wall Street investment banking, Hughes landed analyst positions at UBS, the big Swiss bank, and at Citigroup, where he was promoted to third-year analyst. "He seemed to enjoy it," his father said. "I never heard a peep of complaint out of him." 'Sometimes he slept under his desk' In 2014, Hughes moved to Moelis, which he figured would be more prestigious and less bureaucratic than Citigroup. He was hired in May and promoted to associate, a rare feat for someone without an MBA. His father said he was well reviewed in December and received a bonus in the $US400,000 range, on top of his $US100,000 salary.

John Hughes said he was amazed by his son's compensation. "My jaw dropped!" he said. "I kept my mouth shut, but I said, 'Hey, that's good. They must like you!'" (Moelis declined to comment about Thomas Hughes' compensation or work-related activities.) The hours were long, of course. John Hughes would make dinner arrangements with his son, but some were cancelled when Thomas Hughes got stuck at work. Other times, when John Hughes would be in Manhattan on business, he would arrange to meet Thomas Hughes for a quick hello at the Starbucks near Moelis' Park Avenue headquarters. But after 15 minutes, he said, his son would be fidgeting, anxious to return to work. "He worked late nights all the time," his older brother said at his funeral. "Sometimes he slept under his desk." Thomas Hughes had a routine in which his mother acted as his personal alarm clock, calling him until he woke up. "I would question how long he would need to keep on doing this, but he said: 'I'm 29. This is what you do when you're 29,'" Marypat Hughes said. "I think he found his work rewarding and stimulating, and he was very engaged by it." She says that she thinks he was working too hard but that his death "is a tragedy that defies any kind of explanation."

Aside from work, there were other stresses in Thomas Hughes' life. His weight fluctuated. He and the serious girlfriend he had at Northwestern broke up after they had lived together in New York. He was upset by the breakup. "He was crazy for her," John Hughes said. But between his long hours and sometimes reckless behaviour, it didn't work out, he said. Moelis called John Hughes to offer condolences after Thomas Hughes' death. "He was very gracious, too," John Hughes said. He spoke to some of his son's colleagues at Moelis. "They can't explain it," he added. "He was a happy guy." Thomas Hughes and his older brother had planned vacations for Tel Aviv, in August, and India, for Christmas.

Ken Moelis declined to be interviewed, but a Moelis & Co. spokesman issued a statement reading, "We miss Tom greatly and continue to privately mourn his passing." 'Misery Poker' There's no getting around the reality that investment banking, especially when advising on corporate deals or working on public offerings of debt or equity, is a labor-intensive business that resists automation. Each deal is different, even if some of the characteristics of a particular industry or aspects of a negotiation appear to be the same. Moreover, unlike most lawyers, investment bankers are paid only when a deal happens. So life on Wall Street is a never-ending push to close deals, often by sheer will, and then go on the prowl for new deals and new fees. It is a relentless client-driven, client-service business. These inflexible industry dynamics are intensified by a world where technology makes nearly everyone reachable anytime, anywhere, which is one reason the banks have tried to enforce the new rules about not communicating with the office during time away from work. Roose, the author, said he was told of a game junior bankers play called "Misery Poker," in which they sit around and perversely brag about their workload.

"It's a badge of honour, and that culture is one reason why I am not at all hopeful about these rules that put caps on how much people are allowed to work, because in many cases the severe culture is being self-imposed," he explained. 'I work twenty hours at a stretch' When Goldman received the news of Gupta's death, it dispatched two members of its management committee, David Solomon and John Weinberg, to San Francisco to meet with Gupta's colleagues. The gesture was cold comfort to Gupta's father, Sunil Gupta, an educator from New Delhi. In an online journal, Sunil Gupta traced the vicissitudes of his son's short life: from the joy the family felt about his graduation from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to his thrill at being hired at Goldman and then to his utter disillusionment once the reality of the job's relentless demands sank in. (Gupta posted his journal on Medium after his son's death and later removed it, but the website Wall Street Oasis republished it.) Within weeks of starting his job, according to his father's journal, Sarvshreshth Gupta was stressed out. He could only occasionally make the 50-minute trip to Pleasanton, California, to see his parents, who were in the state to visit relatives. It was obvious to them that he was struggling.

"Even when he came, he was tired, and sleepy," his father wrote, saying his son told him, "'Papa, I do not get enough sleep. I work twenty hours at a stretch.'" By mid-January, Gupta was thinking the job was not for him and wanted to return to India, according to his father's account. In March, without asking for his parents' advice, Gupta quit, his father wrote. The plan was rejuvenation: sleep, eat properly, go to the gym and work at the family's school in Bikaner, India. But his father thought he should stick it out for the full year and then consider his options. Goldman, too, asked him to reconsider. He returned. "What if I had not forced him to continue?" his father wrote subsequently. "What if his company had not given him the window to reconsider his resignation?" Gupta returned to Goldman, to a life, according to his father, "of hard, continuous work, no breaks, no sleep and no respite." On April 16, at about 2:40 am in San Francisco, he called his parents, who were back in India, his father wrote. "It is too much," he told them, according to his father. "I have not slept for two days, have a client meeting tomorrow morning, have to complete a presentation, my V.P. is annoyed and I am working alone in my office."

His father was furious. He told his son to resign and come home. But his son said that wasn't possible, and said that he would finish his work in about an hour, go home to his apartment, which was about a half-mile from Goldman's office, and then return the next morning, rested and refreshed. Instead, Gupta committed suicide less than two hours later by jumping from his apartment building into the parking lot below, according to San Francisco police. Like John Hughes, Sunil Gupta maintains that his son did not take his own life. (He did not respond to email requests to be interviewed.) Instead, in his journal, he wrote that his son was killed in a traffic accident. "A monster, a devil in his giant motor vehicle," snuffed the life out of him, he wrote. Both fathers agree that the long hours young bankers feel obliged to work, notwithstanding Wall Street's recent attempts to regulate them, are a big problem.

Hughes said curbing time at the office or eschewing weekend work is a fig leaf. He fears that senior bankers, facing their own pressure to bring in more and bigger fees, often make irrational demands on the junior employees at a time when Wall Street's work force is just now starting to get back to the levels before the financial crisis. Hughes wonders why Wall Street doesn't just hire more people and pay everyone a little less? Or why not have some kind of internal ombudsman at each firm who can, as Goldman tries to do, arbitrate the issue of whether individual junior bankers are working too hard or having unreasonable demands put on them? Regardless of the answers, he said, those questions all feel moot now. "We are all struggling with this loss," Hughes said. He started to sob. "You ask me how I deal with it. I'm not really dealing with it. I'm dealing with it by grieving, but I just don't understand." Lifeline 13 11 14 MensLine 1300 789 978

beyondblue 1300 224 636 Kids Helpline 1800 551 800 The New York Times 17-hour days the limit for Goldman Sachs workers