Suicide Dogs the Long-Term Unemployed. What Can Be Done to Help
Them?
 A
photograph taken after a protest in Grand Rapids, Mich. (Flickr user
StevendePolo)
He hit "publish” on the last Wednesday in July, in the middle of a
long afternoon. "I also have become homeless and am on the verge of
suicide. I slept out in the wood last night and didn’t gett very much
sleep. I hate to bring you people down with my problems but I thought
you would like to know this. I don’t know what else to say except I’m
very sorry it turned out like this but I can take the strain of living
like this very much longer.” (All posts are reproduced as published.)
 Image by: Matt Mahurin
The post went up as part of a conversation about homelessness on Unemployed-Friends,
a popular online forum for the unemployed to connect with one another.
Most were discussing how to live in homeless shelters after eviction or
foreclosure. But his post went further. "This is killing me physically
and emotoinally. I am at the end of my rope and getting to the point of
letting go. I have tried everything I know to get help. DHS won’t help’
Salvation Army won’t help. 211 won’t help. I have no idea as to where to
go from here. If you don’t hear from me by tomorrow I probably will be
dead.”
Thousands of users visit the web site daily, offering one another
everything from advice about applying for unemployment insurance
benefits to emotional support. It is one of dozens of such sites helping
the nation’s 14.6 million unemployed — particularly the long-term
unemployed, the 6.6 million Americans who have been out of work for more
than six months. "I am very tempted to walk in front of an oncoming
semi right now. Sorry to go on ranting but I am getting to the point
where I feel I have no choice. For those of you that want to know I am
currently in Grand Rapids. I appreciate your words of encouragement but
right now it doesn’t seem to be enough to keep me going.”
The post ended, "I will try to tough out another night. Goodbye for
now.”
***
The unemployed commit suicide at a rate two or three times the
national average, researchers estimate. And in many cases, the longer
the spell of unemployment, the higher the likelihood of suicide.
On online fora such as Unemployed-Friends, the topic comes up often, users finding news reports or hearing tell of deaths in their community, and mourning them. There was the Staten Island suicide, where an emergency medical services employee who thought himself about to be fired posted his final words on Facebook: "I can’t go on anymore. I just hung myself.” In Anaheim, Calif., there
was the man underwater on his mortgage and awash in credit card debt who shot his wife and and one of his children before himself. His two children survived. His wife did not. In Indiana, there was the middle-aged mother who sent
her daughter out to buy soda and killed herself before her daughter came back. That happened the day after the repossession of her Chevy Malibu.
Other stories are more apocryphal. In a post that ginned up dozens of
comments and thousands of views on Unemployed-Friends, someone reported
a father of three in Michigan had killed himself, writing in his final
letter, "I am sorry, I have now lost every ounce of pride I ever had.
You will be better off without me.” (The report of the suicide is
unconfirmed.) A colleague told me he knew of a local man who killed
himself when his unemployment insurance ended, because when his
unemployment insurance ended he had no way to pay his child support.
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