Because my area of the country has an agrcultural and energy economy, the great Depression didn't affect us as much as the oilbust of the early eighties. I owned a personnel agency during that terrible time.

I saw so many men who were simply devastated by the sudden loss of employment. There were no new jobs so I just listened while they talked. Eventually informal groups formed and met in my office. I began to write down what the men said. It became clear that they all went through the classic stages of grief.

Job loss was much less traumatic for women and several men outside my groups committed suicide though I never heard of any women doing so.

After a while some of the employers began meeting in my office also and I was surprised to discover they were going through a similar grief reaction. There were a few suicides among employers also though none in my groups.

I removed all the identifying information and took my records to a local university where I worked with psychologists and psychiatrists to develop a protocol for treating people who are suddenly unemployed or causing others to be.

We never came up with anything specific and there was almost nothing in the medical literature. It seems that someone should study that issue and develop methods of dealing with it, but the psychiatrists who were all men seemed almost afraid of it.

It was an interesting time.

smile