Workplace Suicides Skyrocket

Workplace suicides rose 28 percent in 2008 from the year before according to the U.S. Labor Department reports. And according to a December 2008 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, white people age 40 to 64 have "recently emerged as a new high-risk group for suicide."

Susan Baker, M.P.H., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, told CNN the reason for the increase is unknown. But if economic conditions continue to decline, suicides could go up. "This is a concern, especially when one looks at the high rates during the Great Depression," says Baker.

Seetal Dodd, Ph.D., a senior fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia, has found that suicide rates tend to fluctuate with the economic trends -- at least in men. The study is cause for concern, Dodd says, because it identifies middle-aged white men as the new high-risk group for suicide -- the same section of the population at risk for suicide during an economic downturn.

"There is a considerable risk that the current economic situation may result in a further spike in the suicide rate for men of working age, especially if we start to see an increase in unemployment and a decrease in housing affordability and consumer sentiment," Dodd says.

"We ordinarily experience much, much higher rates of suicide during times of recession," says M. Harvey Brenner, professor of public health at the University of North Texas Health Science Center and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Brenner adds that what makes this recession different is that the very wealthy -- who are generally insulated from financial worries -- have taken a huge hit, and they have further to fall.

"You would think these people have such wonderful lives," says Brenner, full of private jets, luxury homes and the best of anything that money can buy. "Yet they are capable of losing much more, because they have so much more."

According to Alpha Galileo, a research news publication, investigators at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Oxford University estimated that soaring stress brought on by job losses could prompt a rise in suicide rates in people under-64 years of age, a rise in heart attack deaths in men between 30 and 44 years, and a rise in homicides rates, corresponding to thousands of deaths in European Union countries, such as the UK.

Professor Martin McKee, one of the report's authors noted that "Suicides are just the tip of the iceberg - rising suicide rates are a sign of many failed suicide attempts and high levels of mental distress among workers and families."