Calls to Bay Area suicide prevention hotlines are up — some by as much as 100% — with the stresses of staying at home, financial problems, job losses and fear of the coronavirus increasingly wearing on people.

The hotline at Crisis Support Services of Alameda County usually fields about 100 to 110 calls per day, said Narges Dillon, executive director, but last week about 200 people a day called — up from 150 the week before.

“A lot of basic needs are being exacerbated right now — finances, housing, food — then add on the isolation, the anxiety and people being in a heightened level of distress,” she said.

Van Hedwall, director of the San Francisco Suicide Prevention Hotline and a licensed marriage and family therapist, said the volume of calls to the nation’s oldest suicide prevention hotline is also up, but what concerns him most is the increase in the number of calls from people deemed high risk — ready to end their lives.

“We used to have two to three high-risk callers a week,” he said. “Now we have two to three a day. That’s a very drastic change speaking directly to people’s mental health. The intensity and risk level has gone up, especially over the past week, and it’s going to go up next week.”

Suicide hotlines in Bay Area counties all work through the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline —1-800-273-TALK (8255) — which fields calls, then routes them to local hotline counselors. The hotlines operate daily and around the clock.

The national lifeline has not seen an increase year over year in calls, a spokeswoman said, but an affiliated line, focused on giving emotional support to people affected by disasters, saw a 338% increase in call volume compared with February 2020.

Laurica Brown of Oakland is a counselor for the Alameda County hotline. She’s fielding calls at home instead of in the call center to protect her health.

“The two things I get lots of calls about now are people losing work, if not outright laid off, then furloughed; and there’s lots of fear about having economic needs met,” she said.

She’s also seen a steep and sudden increase in the number of callers dealing with domestic violence in the past five days.

“We’ve gone from before the quarantine helping people process existential issues to processing issues like physical violence and meeting economic needs,” she said.

The uncertainties of the coronavirus crisis — when will this end? Will I be laid off? Can I pay the rent? — lead many to feel helpless and hopeless, Dillon said.

“It makes it harder to use the light at the end of the tunnel as a motivation,” she said.

Joyce Chu, a clinical psychologist and professor at Palo Alto University, a psychology and counseling school, said she’s not surprised by the increase in calls to suicide prevention hotlines, since many people “already have a full plate and something like unemployment” or feeling alone and isolated could induce depression and even thoughts of suicide.

It’s unknown if suicide rates will rise because of the crisis.

“Historically, in cases where communities came together, like in World War II, you didn’t see higher rates,” she said, noting that community-wide needs for social distancing have the potential to be a common problem or even a cause to unite around.

“More community eyes and ears are necessary at this point,” she said. “Reach out to people you don’t usually reach out to.”

Brown encourages people to “be kind to yourself,” she said. “The thing that makes most people feel hopeless is catastrophic thinking — thinking that you can’t control what’s going on. I tell people to lean into what they can control: Give yourself a little grace.”

Dillon advises people to break their troubles into manageable pieces and to focus on what they can accomplish step by step in small blocks of time, say, the next hour or four hours.

She also advised people not to be afraid to call a crisis or suicide hotline to deal with mental health problems or overwhelming worries — even if they’re not thinking of harming themselves.

“They’re more than welcome to call the national suicide hotline if they are not suicidal or thinking of suicide,” she said. “We want people to call us when they’re feeling distress. It’s a myth that people only call us when they are suicidal.”

An earlier version of this story misrepresented Palo Alto University professor Joyce Chu's comments about historical changes in the rate of suicides. A quote and related comments have been corrected and clarified.

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan

More Information If you need help The National Suicide Prevention Helpline— 1-800-273-TALK (8255) — is available 24 hours every day of the year. Calls are transfered to hotlines in the caller’s area.