WASHINGTON Lisa Banks feels hopeless. She's lost an essential part of her identity: Her status as a proud full-time employee is gone.

Ever since the 44-year-old Germantown, Md., resident was laid off from her job as an administrator for a federal contractor in May 2009, she's sent out hundreds of resumes, but only had four interviews. She says she's depressed enough to try to seek out psychological help. But no luck there either: She doesn't have insurance to pay for it.

'I feel as if I'm invisible'

"I've worked all my life. I've been a decent person," she said. "(But now) I feel as if I'm invisible. Like I'm not worth anything to society anymore."

Statistics show that 14 million unemployed Americans continue to suffer the effects of the recession. Of the jobless, more than 44 percent have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, a time frame the Bureau of Labor Statistics considers long-term.

The average unemployed American has been out of a job for a record 40.4 weeks, a figure that's grown steadily in the past three and a half years - from an average of 17.5 weeks in January 2008.

As Americans such as Banks struggle to find jobs, long-term unemployment is wreaking a psychological toll across the United States, with experts and a number of studies saying the jobless are especially at risk of depression, increased anxiety and physical ailments.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group, said in a March report that a cumulative $1.8 billion from mental health services was cut in 32 states and the District of Columbia from 2008 to 2010.

"As a result, we've seen increasing burdens on other systems that are left to respond to people in crisis, like emergency rooms, like law enforcement and jails and prisons and homeless shelters," said Ron Honberg, the group's director of policy and legal affairs.

"Really the impact has been very negative. We're talking about extremely vulnerable people," he added.

He said states hadn't made it easy for people, especially low-income residents, to find easy access to information about their mental health services, which he called "so fragmented" and "incredibly difficult to understand, let alone navigate."

"Lots and lots of people with serious mental health illnesses fall through the cracks, and we see the evidence around us all the time," Honberg said.

Katherine Power, the director of the Center for Mental Health Services at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services, said that around one-third of the 62,000 monthly calls to the 143 suicide-prevention call centers that her agency supports around the U.S. were related to economic distress.

Financial anxiety climbing

Calls about financial anxiety to those centers have increased 5 percent to 10 percent annually in the past three years. She also said she was concerned about the negative ramifications of state budget cuts for mental health services.

"It's very significant in terms of state revenues not being available to fund services, and at the same time the need for services is clearly evident," Power said.

Experts on the psychology of unemployment warn that if the U.S. ignores the issue, the country will pay a price in the future with increased costs for mental health coverage.

"When you have 14 million people who are unemployed and you extrapolate those figures going forward to the future, we're going to have a lot of health problems, a lot of psychological health problems to cope with," said Bob Leahy, head of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York.