From Layoff to Near Suicide

In 2025 I nearly made a suicide attempt. I was one motion away.

My 2022 layoff was a significant factor in the downward spiral that led to my suicidality. Now that I’ve made some progress picking up the pieces of my broken life, I’ve had time to reflect on the relationship between layoffs and suicidality: getting laid off, how the layoff interacts with other stressors and how extended unemployment can lead to suicidal ideation. Based on movies, social media and experiences, how do we develop our perception of this relationship? My hope is that the stories and analysis in this piece will help people intervene early.

‘Office Space’ and ‘Up in the Air,’ My First Media Encounters With Layoffs and Suicide

As a 90s kid, “Office Space” was my introduction to the idea of layoffs, as well as the relationship between layoffs and suicide. The “Bobs,” played by John C. McGinley and Paul Wilson, visit the company to evaluate employees and conduct layoffs. Their first victim is Tom Smykowski, played by Richard Riehle. The Bobs easily illustrate how Smykowski’s job is worthless, a waste of money. McGinley’s character asks, “What would you say you do here?” Smykowski can’t provide a decent answer, so he melts down.

Upon my first viewing, I wondered why the company would create and fill unnecessary jobs. Today I understand. Part of adulthood is learning the painful answers to those types of curiosities.

I hesitate to criticize the scene’s lack of realism. “Office Space” is a satire, after all. Nonetheless, I do want to point out that it’s highly unusual for people to be called into a meeting where they defend their jobs during a round of layoffs. Executives almost always decide layoffs without any input from the people who will be affected. During that type of meeting, the decision has already been made. Nothing the employee says will affect the outcome. The scenario in “Office Space” does happen, but it’s rare.

It’s unlikely that standardizing the “fight for your job in this meeting” approach to layoffs would be a net positive for employees. When executives smell redundancy on a position — despite often being the ones who created that position — it’s typically only a matter of time before the employee is laid off. That meeting is more of a humiliation ritual than an opportunity for salvation.

After suffering this humiliation ritual, Smykowski begins a suicide attempt by flooding his car’s engine in his garage. His wife walks in on him, unsure of what’s happening. Embarrassed, he pretends the engine flooding was an accident. Looking at his loving wife’s face, he feels renewed will to live.

When it comes to suicide attempts, many stories go with the engine-flooding-in-the-garage approach. The irony is that people are less likely to attempt suicide when they’re economically comfortable enough to have a house, garage and car.

Upon pulling out of his driveway, a drunk driver crashes into Smykowski. One of Smykowski’s colleagues says he obtains a seven-figure settlement. The narrative implies Smykowski won’t have to work again because of the settlement money. Unfortunately the movie also plants the possibility that he won’t be able to walk again.

As a kid, working vs. walking for the rest of my life seemed like an easy choice. I hadn’t suffered the torment of abusive, time-wasting, destructive, corrupt, unstable, authoritarian white-collar work situations. Now, if a crossroads demon offered me a comfortable early retirement at the cost of my legs, I might be tempted.

‘Up in the Air’

“Up in the Air” is the opposite of “Office Space”: serious and from the perspective of the people who travel around the country conducting layoffs on behalf of executives with plenty of money to pay. Imagine “Office Space” from the perspective of the Bobs. Released in 2009, the film stars George Clooney and Anna Kendrick as the senior and junior layoffers, respectively.

During the first half of the film, Anna Kendrick’s character lays off a woman in person. The woman says she will soon jump off a bridge.

When people fire you or lay you off, there is a small window of time where you have a bit of power over them. They’re feeling guilty. If they don’t give you an opportunity to be heard, they risk looking cruel or unprofessional in front of other employees.

Upon my first watch of the movie, I thought the woman only wanted to hurt Anna Kendrick’s character. Threatening suicide is an efficient way to make layoffers feel horrible. I didn’t think her threat was real.

Around the end of the film, a few weeks after that particular layoff, Clooney’s character’s boss informs him that the woman was not bluffing. She jumped off the bridge and is dead.

Like some of the situations in “Office Space,” this scenario is realistic but rare. Of the hundreds of posts I’ve read about the relationship between a layoff and suicidality, the vast majority of people don’t consider suicide before or immediately after their layoff, especially if they receive severance. The longer the gap between employment, the more time suicidal ideation has to gradually creep in.

The woman is a fictional character, yet I wondered if her layoff was the last straw. Had there been many other stressors and depressing factors in her life? It was hard for me to imagine that the layoff alone was responsible for her death.

2011, My First Layoff

I did my undergraduate degree at NYU between 2009 and 2013. Nearly every summer, I worked 40 hours a week for a summer logistics internship at Northrop Grumman. My neighbor had graciously helped me get the summer job. Without him, I have no idea where I would’ve ended up. Working in the military industrial complex conflicted with my leftist politics, but it was the only offer I had managed to secure. Because of my private college tuition, my family and I needed the extra money.

One week before I was scheduled to begin my 2011 summer season, a woman from Northrop Grumman called and said the position was gone, at least for this summer. I spent many weeks trying to get other work. I even considered doing those stupid door-to-door cutlery sales that tend to be scams. Nothing. Every application was a rejection or a ghost.

That summer was also when my therapist diagnosed me with major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. The symptoms — sleep deprivation and severe constipation due to lack of serotonin in the gut — had been building up for a year, but I’m sure the layoff provided some acceleration. Another exacerbation was that my maternal grandfather had passed away from an advanced form of Parkinson’s.

2011 was the first year I had thoughts of my own death, but not suicide. The imagery was always about a freak accident happening to me. My will seemed irrelevant. There was a part of me that believed only death could provide sufficient relief, but that part was relatively soft spoken.

2015, My Second Layoff

In 2014 I achieved my short-held dream of becoming a full-time writer. I had managed to pay my rent with freelance writing checks in 2013, but I felt better having a full-time job.

At the beginning of 2015, my job got even better. Our team brought on a managing editor from AP and CNN, as well as an assistant managing editor who had been a military journalist. They taught me everything I know about journalism, and I became a real reporter. Our growing team became close, sitting around large tables in our little startup co-working office space.

On the cusp of the second quarter of the year, our leaders informed us that the business would be pivoting from B2C to B2B. Our team had to write and submit B2B article samples. There were rumblings as to why. I wasn’t entirely sure, though. I was young, naive.

A few days later, my assistant managing editor told me to leave work early. I asked why, and she wouldn’t tell me. To cut the tension, she made an old reference: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

I came in the next day to find that more than half my team was gone. They had all been laid off.

For a while I told myself I’d be fine. Surely there wouldn’t be another layoff round of that magnitude. The B2B reporting was more satisfying. I started dating the woman who would become my wife. Life was good.

Then the next announcement came in: We would all be gone by July. If I’m remembering correctly, my last day of work was around my birthday, June 29. We spent many of our remaining days job hunting, but most of us didn’t have an offer by the end.

That final lunch, we ate the most expensive sushi in the area, all on the company card. We hugged. My managing editor told me to believe in myself. Outwardly, I had been so cocky. She saw right through me.

For years I thought that layoff would be the most devastating. I loved that job. I loved spending time with my co-workers.

About two months later, I had a new full-time job. The gap was too brief for suicidality to take root, much less bloom.

2022, My Third (and Last?) Layoff

Between 2015 and 2021, I suffered almost every form of employee abuse. I was fired and forced out, but not laid off. Most of my employment gaps were short, easy to explain (lie about, because you don’t say you were fired or forced out) during interviews.

Through sheer dumb luck, I had avoided the lockdown layoffs of 2020 and 2021. During 2020 I happened to be working at a consumer-packaged goods e-commerce startup that sold several of the hot COVID items: masks, hand sanitizer, hand soap and shelf-stable food products. They fired me in September of 2020, but I was already deep in the interview process with another company. That company made me an offer shortly after.

In early 2021 the company’s new head of marketing decided my job was worthless and that I should pivot to a new job. This new job was the one that actually was worthless. It was impossible to succeed in.

I thought back to Smykowski’s situation in “Office Space.” It wasn’t his fault that the company had created and filled an unnecessary position. Incompetence at the top level causes overhiring and misalignment on the value of certain roles. These problems contribute to layoffs.

A few weeks later, it became obvious they were preparing to lay off or fire me. They posted the listing for my job and invited everyone on the marketing team to a company conference except me. They thought they were slick, that I wouldn’t see what was going on. Before they could let me go, I secured the aforementioned Director of Content Marketing job and quit with two days notice.

In March, 2021 I began my director job. I was at a commercial real estate financing startup. My boss was the first in years who treated me well on a personal level.

Having overcome so many struggles, my guard was lowered a bit in 2022. All of my firings had been due to personal problems with abusive bosses. Now I had a nice boss who liked me. I had better control of my temper, more obedience and an improved understanding of office politics. I had been at the company for more than a year without any problems.

Then the inflation crisis worsened. After two years of lockdown layoffs, we entered the era of inflation layoffs.

I immediately started applying and interviewing. Throughout the year, I somehow balanced working my job, interviewing, releasing my novel and dealing with my rollercoaster health problems. No offers.

Toward the end of the year, my team agreed to bring on a full-time subordinate for me to manage. My main project was a website that was separate from the company’s website, an idea I had been opposed to from the beginning. The subordinate would execute the work for the company website.

While we were hiring for this role, a new boss came on to head the marketing department. He prevented me from hiring the person I wanted as my subordinate. I had to go with the backup person. Then he and my old boss shut down my main project.

On the last day of November, 2022, I woke up and checked my work email to see a letter announcing my layoff and instructing me to stay home. It seemed like about half the company had been laid off. An hour or so later, I had a phone call with my boss and the head of HR. They wished me well. Shortly after, I realized they had replaced me with my subordinate, who was significantly cheaper and less skilled.

My old boss called me and said some kind words about how I had been great to work with, how he felt horrible about the layoffs. He checked in with me periodically. Eventually I asked him to stop. I told him it was not good for my mental health to hear from him. To his credit, he responded courteously to my request.

Because I knew the layoff would come at some point, I had been convincing my family members to invest with me in a passive income commercial property. Through my commercial real estate brokerage employer, I had connections and good advice. The goal was to establish consistent income that wasn’t tied to a job and didn’t require management responsibilities. That way, if me or my wife got laid off, we would still have money coming in, and we wouldn’t have to become property managers. We’d still be able to pursue careers we had experience and affinities for. We wouldn’t have to give up our financial freedom by asking our parents for help.

When I got laid off, we were in the middle of the real estate deal. As the deal was approaching completion, interest rates spiked again. I reminded my family members that the point of the investment was to have passive income that would grow over time, not to make a big profit in the near future. They didn’t listen to me. What little cooperation they had was gone.

The deal fell apart.

The Pain of Other People’s Layoffs

The first six months after my layoff were actually OK. I had a good severance package and tons of freelance work waiting for me. The work was fun. I wrote articles about pop culture and managed the production of physical magazines.

By the middle of May, 2023, all of the people giving me freelance work had been laid off. I was still applying for full-time jobs, part-time jobs, seasonal jobs and freelance work. Nothing. Interviews here and there, but no offers. I made every change and test possible: different resumes and cover letters, tweaking every piece of copy in my LinkedIn page over and over again, shutting down all of my social media accounts that had political posts, trying every job board platform I could find. I even hired an expensive career coach. Still nothing.

I thought back to how my freelancers must have felt when I got laid off. As a Director, I had dozens of freelancers working for me. For several of them, I was their biggest gig. For many, I was their only gig during a barren era with no relief in sight. In one day, all of that work was gone forever. Losing your main freelance gig can feel similar to losing a full-time job.

Job losses are different from many other types of tragedies. If someone mugs you at gunpoint and takes all the money in your wallet, you’ll likely be traumatized, probably more acutely than a layoff. The material damage usually ends with the incident. Your loved ones feel bad for you, but their economic situation hasn’t changed. A layoff, however, cuts a hole in many people’s bank accounts. The ripples of my layoff might have reached hundreds of people.

The First Suicidal Ideations

During the second half of 2023 and all of 2024, my life fell into a routine that fluctuated between hopeful and horrible. A lot of the money from the failed real estate investment was still in my bank account. Instead I decided to spend most of it on my business. The Rauch Review, the publication you’re reading at this moment, is the main asset of that business.

For a while I was confident in its success. The vast majority of my employee career had been managing brand publications, several of which I had made highly profitable. I had wanted to make my own brand publication for years, but I had been busy with my novels, full-time jobs and health issues. I had also struggled to complete the team of necessary freelancers.

In May, 2023 my wife referred me to a designer who had just finished her master’s program and was looking for freelance work. As she was midway through the project, she got a full-time job. Our launch date became horribly delayed.

In 2024 I found freelance work again, but very little. The bulk of the next two years, my life repeated this cycle:

• Get freelance work
• Use freelance work to fund business
• Lose freelance work to layoffs
• Ask friends, colleagues and family who have lots of money to help me with my business through Patreon (starting at only $1 a month) and such, get rejected or get an insufficient amount
• Health worsens

Eventually I realized my old life was gone. I wasn’t going to get another full-time job in my field. My health was too bad to do shift work, mostly because my body had lost its ability to regulate temperature in cold warehouses and grocery stores. I couldn’t do driving work because I didn’t have enough money to lease a car. No matter how many tests I did, doctors couldn’t figure out why my health was declining. Therapy and medication had reached their limits.

The more time went on, the more employers laid off people across nearly every industry, the more I lost the economic freedom I had worked so hard to maintain. All gone.

My marriage, one of the only remaining sources of joy in my life, was deteriorating. All the stressors were crumbling us away.

After my wife and I came home from a weekend trip that was supposed to be good for our mental health, I sat in silence on our couch. She had asked me why I hadn’t voiced my opposition to the trip, and I had told her it was because I wasn’t a person anymore. Everyone else had total ownership over me. What right did I have to go against her opinion?

My eye cameras left my body, floated upward, drifted until they surfed the skyline. They landed around the Manhattan Bridge. Over and over again, I constructed short films on how I would find a spot on the bridge, jump it and ensure death on first attempt. Suddenly I awoke from my trance. According to my computer, I had been deep in suicidal ideations for three hours.

I cried and told my wife what had happened. I talked to my parents and a few of my close friends. Again, some of them asked if there was anything they could do. Again, I told them the only form of help they could provide was a small recurring donation to my business.

Nothing changed. No one did anything differently.

LinkedIn Suicide Posts

In March, 2025 I saw this post on LinkedIn:

“My name is Michael and I am suicidal
I lost my last full time real job back in November 2023
November of 2023
April 2024 if I remember correctly this happens
I get a contract gig with Moodys Northwest Consulting working for T-Mobile
At the time I was basically homeless , had no money left had to declare bankruptcy
I take what money I could borrow and loan
Move over 1000 miles away for T-Mobile
3 months . Not even a full theee months T-Mobile and Moodys Northwest Consulting tell me to go fuck myself
This was October last year
I lost everything again
My family left me , I lost my home , I lost my meaning ,
My own llc I started out of desperation , VSaaS service , I built an mvp , built a solid foundation but it means nothing
I lost everything again and again
I apply , I reach out . I update and change my resume …
In total I have applied to over 5000 jobs –
None of those applications amounted to anything.
I feel numb and done.
All I wanted was a job
All I wanted was to feel like I matter or that my life matters or that some what somehow I mean something … whatever
All I wanted was a job but the t-mobile bullshit killed me …. I’ve been in a hole since and I do not see a way out
I just wanted a job. I don’t see ever getting one again.
I want this known to people:
Suicide is not the cowards way out. It takes real god damn guts
Suicide is an option – don’t tell people it’s not if you’re not going to actually help them
Don’t self gland hand and make some repost of this or reply as you think your words are going to solve this or tell me to go get help.
I can’t afford help – duh. I need this thing called … a job – so I can afford to go get help.
So that’s it – that’s my post. I deleted the others because I was scared about it affecting my ability to maybe get another job at some point.
But I don’t think I’ll ever get another job again.
Don’t DM me asking if I am okay
Don’t reply telling me to “get help” , I can’t afford it – I kinda need you know , a job.”

The comments were full of people sharing similar experiences. We had become accustomed to these kinds of sad stories: asking LinkedIn connections for money, begging for a job, getting laid off several times in one year, moving for a job and then immediately getting laid off, living in shelters. Millions of former employees had been without a full-time job for six months, a year, two years, three like myself. All that education and debt only to do the shift work we could have taken straight from high school, if that work was even available.

I thought about Michael’s situation and told myself there was no way I could fall to that mental place. Thanks to my loved ones, I wasn’t homeless or hungry. My marriage was deteriorating, but it was still there.

The Near Attempt

As 2025 marched on, I circled the drain. Like Michael, I had made an LLC and tried to get my business to stable profit. Just as I was building a significant amount of traffic to The Rauch Review, Google rolled out their AI overviews. I lost about half of my organic search traffic. My traffic stagnated for other reasons I would not figure out until many months later.

Before I again lost all of my freelance work, I had a freelance gig writing content for an online therapy company. They wanted my help completing a series on all the types of psychotherapy. My main point of contact sent me a list and asked me which therapy types I was interested in. I chose only the ones about suicide.

I convinced myself I had chosen those therapies only because I hadn’t heard of them. Every time I did the research, there was this data point: unemployment is one of the top causes of suicide.

Again I made a list of people I was comfortable asking for help. Again they all said no or offered insufficient support, despite their abundance of resources.

Dozens of them were people whom I had supported during their times of need. I had helped them get jobs, freelance work, bylines, connections, health care, dates. I had sacrificed for them. When I told them honestly how I was doing, they asked if there was anything they could do to help. When I told them all I wanted was a dollar a month (or more ideally) for my Patreon, only a few of those dozens got back to me.

My body declined further. Blood flow decreased to a concerning level. Energy plummeted. Body aches and pain skyrocketed. There were times in the day when my head felt partially numb. It seemed like my blood was struggling to circulate fully.

With a new psychiatrist, I tried combining new drugs with my regular SNRI. There were whispers of relief, but the side effects were brutal. When we upped the dosage, my body would experience temporary relief and then decline again.

I needed a source of hope. Tired of my living situation, I begged my loved ones to help me leave New York. If I moved to San Diego, I could try to get a car or borrow one. I would have options there, a chance at regaining my economic freedom, with what little energy I had to work.

Nonetheless, my loved ones refused to help or offer a timeline for when they might help.

I realized I had two options:

1. Stay in NYC indefinitely, give up on my business and sit around an apartment I didn’t want to live in, maybe write another novel that probably wouldn’t sell and wouldn’t fix my situation
2. Move in with my parents and borrow their car for driving work

The second option would likely mean the end of my marriage.

I had to make a choice. If my blood flow continued to decrease, I would die. But I didn’t want either of those choices.

As I contemplated my misery, my eyes caught a glint of light off the silver handle of our largest, sharpest kitchen knife.

There was a third option.

My blood ached. I was tired of it. Maybe it was tired of me, too.

Suddenly I remembered a sad half joke I hadn’t told in a while. Mosquitos don’t like me very much. They’ll settle for me if I’m all that’s on the menu, if hunger is the only other option. When other people are with me beside the mosquitos, it’s hilarious to observe the visible difference in popularity. My friends and family members began to notice the pattern.

I’d say the mosquitos knew my blood wasn’t the best. Through all my layers of skin, they could smell the inferior quality. Like drinking the tap water on your first trip to a poor nation, why do it when bottled water is right there, when your money goes so far, when you’re far from parched?

If I bled away all the bad blood, would I experience at least one moment of absolute relief? Perhaps my blood and I were ready for a trial separation.

I thought back to that woman in “Up in the Air.” Her eyes were so tired. For her, it was three weeks. For me, perhaps it would be three years. My eyes were so tired. They didn’t even have enough blood in them.

If my wife walked in on me, I wouldn’t be able to lie and play off what I was doing. Time was limited.

I let the blade sit on my wrist. Gradually, I tightened my grip and pushed down until I felt pain.

I wish I could tell you, my dear reader, that I stopped because I wanted to live. I wish I could tell you I stopped because I imagined the heartbreak my loved ones would feel.

No. I had long suffered from hemophobia. When I visualized how much blood I might see before I died, my grip loosened. Then I worried about what would happen if I failed the attempt. I’d lose even more freedom. My loved ones might make me live. I’d lose the ability to make a better attempt, one I where I wouldn’t be able to lose my nerve after starting

Simultaneously, a primal portion of me screamed to be alive, to grip the edges of the drain and claw upward. While that piece of my will to live was intact and seemed to have more than 50% control, I told my wife what had happened. I demanded she put our knives in the safe, lock it, change the combination and keep the new combination secret, no matter what I asked her. When I began thinking about our roof, I booked a hotel that didn’t have roof access. I planned to sequester there until the suicidal urges became manageable.
The Long Climb Back to Health and Freedom
My wife became supportive of the move to San Diego. AI was coming for her job anyway. We were privileged to have other means of surviving until we pivoted our careers or until my business became profitable.

Before we moved, an MRI showed that there were unusually large air pockets in my head. My neurologist agreed with my theory that some of the blood-starved flesh had shrunk, collapsed in, leaving room for the air pockets.

The drug trials motivated me to conduct more research on my health, and I concluded that I likely had treatment-resistant depression. My psychiatrist confirmed this diagnosis. We agreed that transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) might work. Because TMS uses magnetic radiation to directly stimulate neurons in the depressed part of the brain, most bodies are unable to resist. There happened to be a highly-rated TMS firm in San Diego.

TMS has worked well enough to return much of my previous bloodflow. I’m still receiving sessions, still seeing how much of my health it can restore. Ultimately the root cause was that my brain lost the power to command my body with a normal amount of volume. Whispers pleaded ripples from my blood. I needed shouts that summoned waves.

My wife and I are doing much better. We are trying to heal.

The Rauch Review is on track to be profitable, but there is still a grueling climb ahead. Sometimes it looks like we should have profitability in early 2027. Other times I’m not sure. A comfortable amount of profit is far away, but for now I would be elated just to regain my economic independence.

People have become a little more supportive of my business. I wish it hadn’t taken a near suicide attempt for them to fully understand how much I needed help, but better to see a silver lining.

Advice for the Stable and Unstable

If you are doing OK financially and know someone who has been laid off, the best form of support might just be to set up a recurring transfer to them. Small amounts add up. If you can rally other loved ones to do the same, the person could have enough to survive on until they get back on their feet. Recurring transfers are great because no one has to beg you.

Whatever you do, please don’t make us beg, not if you can help it. Begging is deeply humiliating. Layers of humiliation and dehumanization push people toward suicide.

Don’t ask us if we have applied to enough jobs. If we don’t have money to pay for it, don’t tell us to go back to school. Don’t tell us to ‘just” do something we don’t have any talent for. If it was possible for everyone to be a doctor or a lawyer, of course we’d do so.

If you’re laid off but physically healthy, don’t take your health for granted. Don’t be prideful. A body that can tolerate cold temperatures can do shift work. If you can’t get shift work but do have a car, do driving work. Another thousand applications doesn’t guarantee anything, but driving guarantees a paycheck.

People can love you but still fail you. Unfortunately there isn’t a guaranteed correlation between caring and caretaking ability. If you’re lucky, you’ll be blessed with loved ones who have an affinity for caretaking in a crisis. If not, remember that your family probably doesn’t want you to suffer. They just weren’t ready for you to need so much help. They don’t know how to set aside their own sense of self-preservation and discomfort.

Once survival and independence are achieved again, diversify your reasons to live. Build the backup systems you wish had been there to catch you. Together we will endure and try to create a kinder society.