Suicide Hotline Calls Surge As Unemployment Tightens Its Grip

In one of the darkest tallies of the nation’s still sputtering recession, experts say that financial desperation has played a substantial role in increased calls to suicide prevention hotlines and has likely resulted in increased suicide rates, according to AolNews.

While government statistics on suicides frequently lag by two or three years, experts say that the easier to track calls to hotlines have grown substantially. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which operates 24-hour crisis help lines around the country, reported an increase of 18% from January to May. The rates have fluctuated wildly, from 13,424 in January of 2007 to a peak of 59,500 in May of this year.

Federal mental health programs funneled an additional $1 million to the Lifeline in 2009 to increase outreach in 20 programs targeting severely stressed places like Michigan. According to Dr. John Draper, director of the Lifeline, past studies have shown a correlation between unemployment rates and suicide rates.

“There is no reason to believe this would be different,” he said. “There is very appropriate concern at the federal level. While we don’t have the data yet, we’re not waiting.”

In November, an unofficial tally of 19 states by The Wall Street Journal found an increase of 2.3% in the 2008 suicide rate over the 2007 rate. Recently, other news outlets around the nation have reported a troubling flow of suicides and murder-suicides by people facing crippling financial troubles. They are as follows:

• An armed man facing foreclosure, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, called police on July 1, threatening suicide. Authorities said that after officers arrived, the man talked with them from the porch of his house and then burst down the steps, waving his gun while screaming “Suicide by cop!” He died in a hail of bullets.
• A husband, in Santa Ana, California, called police later that same day to say that he had shot his wife while she slept and then overdosed on Valium in a murder-suicide pact the morning they were to be evicted from their apartment. He survived and has been charged with murder.
• A husband and father, in Anaheim, California, facing foreclosure and a mountain of credit card debt, shot and killed his wife; critically wounded their 3-year-old son; shot at, but missed, their 5-year-old son; and then killed himself in June, police said.

In many instances, those committing suicide have underlying psychological problems or other issues that leave them more vulnerable to the stresses that accompany long-lasting joblessness and financial crises, according to Stephanie Coontz, a history and family studies professor at Evergreen State College in Washington and director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families.

“When men feel that they are financially responsible for the family, the family cannot or should not live without them. So they take them with them,” said Coontz, co-author of a report, released earlier this year, entitled “The Long-Range Impact of the Recession on Families.” “You’ll see cases where people will lie about having a job or having money. Then, when the woman is about to find out, he kills her and commits suicide rather than face the humiliation. It’s an overidentification with the male protector/breadwinner role.”

Several studies have found links between long periods of joblessness and increased risks of death by suicide, according to Coontz. During the Great Depression, which started with the stock market crash in October of 1929, suicides peaked in 1933, increasing from 14 per 100,000 to 17 per 100,000 at a time when joblessness reached 25%.

In Los Angeles, Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services saw a doubling of calls, from 2007 to 2008, to its suicide hotline, which president and CEO Dr. Kita S. Curry says is the second busiest in the national Lifeline system. Direct links to the Great Recession can’t be drawn because awareness of the services has also increased.

“But we’ve been tracking the calls, and there has been an increase in the number of callers who mention economic worries as part of what’s troubling them,” said Curry, who is also a psychologist. Those who see no hope of positive change are at the greatest risk for suicide.

“Right now, with the economy, people do feel hopeless and helpless. It isn’t something that they can control,” she said. And the worries frequently extend to kids, she said, citing a study in which children ages 8 to 12 and 13 to 18 reported that they were experiencing more stress this year in comparison to 2009.

“Some of these jobs are gone forever,” Coontz said. “We’ve already been experiencing a transition away from a manufacturing economy and this hollowing out of secure middle-wage jobs. That is something that is very foreign to the American, the notion that they’re not going to do as well as their parents, and their kids are not going to do as well as them.”

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which is open 24 hours, can be reached at 800-273-TALK (8255).