Lest anyone doubt that a severe recession can have devastating effects on the psyches of affected workers, here is some evidence worth taking very seriously.
Thomas H. Maugh II, in a piece for the Los Angeles Times (link here), reports on a Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study indicating that among working age people, suicides increase during bad economic times and decline during more prosperous times.
Everyone is familiar with stories of businessmen jumping to their deaths from window ledges during the Great Depression. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that those stories, sometimes viewed as apocryphal, have a strong basis in fact: The rate of suicides rises during times of economic hardship and declines in periods of prosperity.
This is no quick snapshot of the current recession. The CDC study spans 80 years of data.
Confirming reportage
When reporter Louis Uchitelle began researching his book The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences (2006), he did not anticipate that he “would be drawn so persistently into the psychiatric aspect of layoffs.” But he soon understood that the “emotional damage was too palpable to ignore.” For the suddenly unemployed, “a layoff is an emotional blow from which very few fully recover.”
Furthermore, Uchitelle found that “layoffs damage companies by undermining the productivity of those who survive but feel vulnerable, as well as the productivity of those who are laid off and get jobs again. All lose some of the commitment, trust, and collegial behavior that stable employment or the expectation of stable employment normally engenders.”