“Historically, suicide rates do rise during economic downturns. The entire population is still experiencing the downstream effects of economic recession,” Moutier says.

But while it’s possible to link workplace issues to suicide, such as the case of a worker who is laid off or fired, and subsequently kills himself, Moutier says it's “far more likely” that issues at work are just one more stressor for someone who is already vulnerable to suicide because of pre-existing mental-health conditions, such as depression or substance abuse.

“There are many risk factors for suicide—from a person’s mental or physical health to his or her genetics—and workplace suicide is no exception,” she points out. “But by far the greatest risk is whether someone has access to the means—a gun, prescription medicines—to commit a suicidal act.”

A new study today in the American Journal of Preventative Health took a deeper look at this upward trend and found that while workplace suicides decreased between 2003 and 2007, they sharply increased from 2007 to 2010. Several factors placed some people at higher risk of workplace suicide than others, according to Hope Teisman, the lead author on the study, and an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Teisman’s team based their analyses on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Census of Fatal Occupational Injury (CFOI) database from 2003-2010. Most studies prior to this that examined the link between suicide and occupation using death-certificate data, but did not limit suicides to those that occurred at the workplace.

Researchers found that men were 15 times more likely than women to kill themselves at work, a finding Teisman says is in line with more men committing suicide in general. Researchers also found that men and women defined by the CORI database as other/unknown race were more likely to kill themselves at work than those whose race was identified, and that men and women between the ages of 65 and 74 were almost three times as likely to kill themselves at work as people of other ages. Neither of these findings are as easily explained.

Researchers found that, in general, people working in protective-services occupations—a swath of the workforce that includes law-enforcement officers and firefighters—were more than 3.5 times more likely to take their lives at work than those in other occupations. Eighty-four percent of the time, these suicides involved a firearm.

“When you have such easy access to a gun, suicide becomes an option,” says Sergeant Brian Fleming, a 32-year veteran of the Boston Police Department and an instructor at the Boston Police Academy.

Fleming has devoted his life to suicide prevention, including a 15-year tenure at the Boston Police Department Peer Support Unit, where he led the charge in debriefing the officers responding to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. “The tragedies that cops see in their day to day work are traumatic. Not knowing if you’re going to make it home alive—that’s traumatic. It takes a toll,” he says.