Salon has a very timely article about the double-whammy the recession has dealt mental health in many communities. While families are under huge financial stress leading to mental health issues, state funding for mental health services is being savagely cut
late 2009, as the unemployment rate in San Joaquin County, California, reached 18 percent and one in twelve homes were being foreclosed, two high school students in the town of Ripon, population 15,000, committed suicide within two months of each other. Over the next eighteen months, sixteen more teenagers around the county took their own lives, a not-uncommon occurrence that public health researchers refer to as “suicide contagion.”
Years of declining budgets had cut the number of counselors, nurses and psychologists in county schools, impairing the ability of individual districts to handle the needs of grieving students, parents and communities on their own.
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/the_depressing_toll_of_the_great_recession/
