One of these centers, serving Palm Beach, Florida, and four surrounding counties reported an 87 percent increase in calls related to suicide over the past year, with almost three times as many callers contemplating suicide because of financial distress.

At the top of the list of callers' concerns were worries about homelessness or home foreclosure. In 2008, more than 2.3 million Americans faced home foreclosure proceedings, an 81 percent increase from 2007.

Oregon's suicide prevention line, Oregon Partnership, recorded a 55 percent increase in calls over the past year. Director Leslie Storm said callers have also been mentioning job and money concerns increasingly in the past few months.

This stress is being translated to the workplace—if not around the water cooler, then in calls to counselors available through employee assistance programs.

Aetna Behavioral Health, a program provider, experienced a 55 percent increase in the third quarter of 2008 for calls relating to financial stress over the same quarter in 2007, a 12 percent increase in reported anxiety and panic disorders, and a 7 percent increase in reported depression.

"I think anxiety as much as depression is a featured element in a lot of the phone calls, and that's kind of unusual," said Louise Murphy, head of Aetna Behavioral Health. "You're going to bed at night and you've just turned on the 10 o'clock news and unemployment is up, and that anxiety starts to wash over them."

Mary Tavarozzi, a principal at Towers Perrin, a healthcare consulting group, said that employers are responding to the recession by actively advertising the counseling services available under certain healthcare plans. Some have even asked healthcare providers place a counselor on a job site a few times a week, or have made outside experts on financial planning available to their workers.

Over the next few months, the Samaritans of New York, a suicide prevention group and crisis line for New York City and the New York State Office of Mental Health will be strategizing how corporations can play a more active role in suicide prevention, said Samaritans director Alan Ross.

"The government and Congress and president are focusing on rescue and working to rebuild the financial credit and industrial structures of this country," Ross said. "No one's talking about rebuilding the emotional and well-being of the public that is just as affected as the economy."

Reaching out to friends, family, and counselors can ease the sense that one is isolated in a problem and reduce an individual's suicide risk, says Dr. Yeates Conwell, co-director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide at the University of Rochester Medical Center in upstate New York. Helping people gain perspective of their situation, he said, is integral to suicide prevention.

"The good side of the story is that it's happening to the great majority of the country," Dr. Conwell said. "We all need help coping with circumstances like that. The people who have access to help externally or internally will be able to cope better. And the people who don't will then develop the clinical conditions that may increase their risk tremendously for things like clinical depression and alcoholism."

As Berman of the Association of Suicidology remarked, "Recessions do end, and people who are affected need to make it through to survive and recover."