The headlines have had a similar ring: A Frederick County man underwater on his mortgage kills himself and his family. A man accused of financial improprieties does the same while staying at a Towson hotel. A top official with Freddie Mac, a company with major money woes, is found dead in an apparent suicide.
With the economic crisis showing little sign of easing - and with a known link between suicide and unemployment rates - experts warn that stressful life events such as losing a job, a home or savings can unhinge those who are vulnerable to harming themselves and others. The suicide rate, like the incidence of depression, rises when the economy falls.
"It is so regular a pattern among most of the industrialized countries of the world that it is virtually an economic indicator," said M. Harvey Brenner, professor emeritus at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "It's a standard feature of recession."
Calls to suicide help lines are up. The Grassroots Crisis Intervention Center in Columbia has seen a 15 percent increase in calls this year from people who feel suicidal. In February, the center recorded a 300 percent spike over February 2008 in calls from people who said money was the main cause of their distress.
"Most folks coming in to see us these days really are at the end of the rope," said Brian Yost, director of crisis services. "We've had folks come in with $3,000 BGE bills because they've been behind six or seven months and late charges keep adding up. They don't know what they're going to do."
Yost said staff members deal first with a person's suicidal impulses. This year, the center has doubled the number of interventions, meaning an ambulance or the police had to be dispatched. But he said the center also tries to address underlying issues by making referrals to service agencies.
"What we're figuring out and what we're discovering is the financial stuff is just one more thing on the plate with everything else," said Timothy Jansen of Community Crisis Services, a nonprofit that runs three suicide hot lines in Maryland. "The challenge with it is there are so few solutions to it."
Suicide and financial strain have long been linked, at least in popular mythology. Legend has it that stockbrokers and bankers jumped to their deaths from their Wall Street windows after the Crash of 1929. It didn't happen, but the peak suicide rate on record was 1933, at the height of the Great Depression. Brenner expects that when the suicide rate for this recession is tallied, it will be high.
