Americans have acquired a strong reputation in foreign countries as the workhorses of the world, plagued by endless hours and deprived of luxuriously long vacations. But in spite of their well-crafted labor models, it is our European counterparts who are coping with frequent waves of work-fueled suicides.

In France, a rash of work-related suicides (24 since February of last year) at France Télécom has spurred a conversation over the implications of such a phenomenon, with many pointing a finger at the destructive nature of stress in the workplace. One psychiatrist interviewed for a New York Times piece claimed that her patients had been primarily concerned with their personal lives during therapy when she began 35 years ago. But today, she said, most consult her about the stress they incur in their places of employment.

France, whose suicide rate is the highest among large European economies, is not alone – Belgium, Finland, Switzerland, Austria and Denmark each suffer from remarkably high numbers of suicides, many of which can be linked to issues within the workplace.

In Sweden, where an average of 1500 suicides are committed on a yearly basis, a study was conducted that found suicide to have an infectious component – that is, people are much more at risk of committing suicide if one of their family members or colleagues have done so. This makes sense in the context of high suicide rates within individual companies, which can function as breeding grounds for a potentially contagious behavioral trend.

And what’s a faster way to spread information and influence within the office than through the Web? The Next Web blogger Martin Bryant wrote that the onset of smart technology could function as a stress catalyst, heightening compulsive behavior that makes employees aware of their work duties at all hours of the day.

France Telecom’s Chief Financial Officer Gervais Pellissier has taken steps to reduce rapid-fire e-mailing without explicitly linking it to the suicides, advising his employees to avoid stress-inducing e-mail overload. “When you were an average employee in a big corporation 15 years ago, you had no mobile phone or no PC at home,” he said. ‘Today for people working in business, whatever the level, whether they are CEO or even first- or second-rank level employees, they are always connected.”