Does the credit crunch effect our health.

Some information from the BBC website.

QUOTE:
Professor Martin McKee, an expert in European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says much of the research on the issue was done in the former Soviet Union where there was a dramatic deterioration in financial security.

"We have shown that regions in the Soviet Union which had the most rapid rate of economic change, for example, loss of jobs, had the highest increase in death rates," he says.

But, says Professor Richard Wilkinson a social epidemiologist at the University of Nottingham, instability in the job market can have an impact on our health.

"Unemployment is always quite damaging to the unemployed themselves but also to those left in jobs who feel increasingly insecure.

Look at post-war Britain - everyone was living a pretty deprived existence but mental health and well-being was fairly good
Professor Alan Maryon Davis

"When people started looking at unemployment and health they looked at factory closures where everyone was laid off together but they found that health actually worsened before when there was a threat of closure."

He says it ultimately comes down to stress and we know a lot more these days about stress-related illness than we did in previous times of hardship.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7523327.stm

Has anyone working in counseling already seeing the impact of the downturn?