A few minutes before she threw herself out of her fourth floor office window, 32-year-old Stephanie sent her father an e-mail. “I have decided to kill myself tonight.  . . . I can’t take the new reorganisation . . . I prefer to die,” she wrote.

Stephanie had been with France Telecom nine years and, after a few ups and downs, was last June posted to the client accounts department in a well-heeled Paris neighbourhood. There she hoped for a new start, according to her father, Guy, interviewed in Paris Match magazine this week. But another wave of restructuring meant another change, and on Friday, September 11, the former law student decided she could no longer cope.