On July 22, in Taunton, Mass., Carlene Balderrama, a wife and mother despondent over her family's financial woes, including the imminent foreclosure of the family home, shot herself to death.

A few days later on CNN, a young woman in Southern California professed thoughts of suicide as she contemplated the loss of her home in foreclosure. She is undoubtedly not alone in what has come to be described as "debt depression," a term encapsulating the rising tide of negative mental health consequences of such hardships among those struggling with job loss, home foreclosure, rising food and gas prices, and declining wages.

What Americans are experiencing economically is clearly not "all in our heads," or, as former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, a John McCain adviser, recently put it, a "mental recession." But the increasing difficulty of the struggle to make ends meet and avoid homelessness is taking a correspondingly harsh toll on the mental health of our citizens. As an attorney whose work takes me all over Georgia, I have witnessed on too many occasions the mental suffering of individuals and families undergoing the kind of severe financial instability that is afflicting our entire nation today. Indeed, Americans by the millions are coping with high levels of anxiety, fear and often a sense of personal failure that make it difficult to take productive steps toward economic recovery.

Moreover, when people lose their jobs or homes, or otherwise face a significant downturn in their finances, the loss of health care coverage may prevent them from seeking mental health care services in order to cope with the psychological fallout from these economic hardships. They may lose hope and refuse to reach out to any source of help. This may well have been the case with Balderrama, whose suicide caught her husband, son and loved ones unawares, because she told no one of her despair. Short of self-harm, that inward-turning psychological response to financial hardship can be isolating and prevent one from taking steps to ameliorate financial problems. Simply put: If you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning because of depression, you can't very easily look for a job or seek help avoiding foreclosure.

Fortunately, financial hardship need not be an impediment to obtaining appropriate mental health services. Increasingly, low-cost or free mental health services are being offered by nonprofit organizations like Atlanta-based Metropolitan Counseling Services. I became involved with MCS in part because I believe MCS and organizations like it can play a critical role in a community's efforts to recover from economic difficulties by addressing the mental health impact of such hardship. Indeed, counseling or psychotherapy can help one transcend despair and rebuild that healthy sense of perspective and self-esteem that is the foundation for effective planning and action in all spheres of life. It could have helped Balderrama see alternatives to suicide as she struggled to cope with her family's financial problems.

In the coming year, we as a nation will be debating how best to repair our health care infrastructure and provide care to all our citizens, regardless of income. In that process, we must not overlook the urgent necessity of providing easily available and affordable mental health care services.

> Brian Kammer is an Atlanta attorney who serves on the board of directors for Metropolitan Counseling Services, a nonprofit provider of mental health services to adults ages 18 and older in the metro Atlanta area. MCS offers individual, couples and group psychotherapy on an affordable, sliding-fee scale For more information, go to www.mcsatlanta.org or call 404-321-1794.