Stephen Pereira is calm; his voice is gentle and his speech, precise. As befits a psychiatrist and cognitive behaviour therapy specialist who attends to City workers’ mental health disorders.
Clients who have gone public about seeing him include Prince William’s brother-in-law James Middleton and the broadcaster Tom Bradby, who described in a recent interview how the insomnia that forced him to take almost five months off from ITV News At Ten was “ten times more frightening” than his experience of being shot.
Dr Pereira was asked to mentor António Horta-Osório, chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, after he received treatment for chronic insomnia in 2011, a condition he likened to torture. Later Mr Horta-Osório said that Dr Pereira helped him to become “more like a palm tree, so when the storm comes the palm tree bends but then comes back up, instead of being like an oak tree and trying to resist the storm, in which case it can break”.