Losing your job can make you feel lousy. Whether you’re fired or laid-off, joining the ranks of the unemployed is not exactly a feel-good event. You don’t need a study to tell you that.

But what impact does losing a job have on your health? Could a layoff send a perfectly healthy person into a downward spiral of sickness? It’s possible, says Kate Strully, a sociologist at State University of New York in Albany. In her new study published in the journal Demography, Strully analyzed a variety of job loss situations — including being fired or laid off or losing a job after the entire company shut down — and found that job loss may indeed trigger serious physical and physiological illness.

The suicide rate in the United States is increasing for the first time in a decade, particularly among middle-aged white women, a new study finds.

“This is a group we haven’t had as much focus on in terms of suicide, because the death rates were higher in elderly white males, and there has been a lot of attention to teenagers and young adults,” said lead researcher Susan P. Baker, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “This 40-to-64 age group has been neglected.”

Read more of the Washington Post article here: Suicide Rates Rise Among Baby Boomers