Unemployment Rate Worse than it Seems

According to this NY Times article, even though the employment rate is currently at 6.7%, it may actually be worse than that, because it doesn't consider those people who want to have a job, but have given up.  There is another measure of employment, that includes these people (people who have looked for jobs in the past year), as well as people who are working part-time that want to work full-time, and that unemployment rate is 12.5%, the highest that it's ever been since they've begun measuring it.  I think that this high unemployment rate is just going to make the economy worse and worse-as more people get laid off, they won't be able to buy things, meaning that companies will have lower profits and be forced to lay off even more workers, and so on.  When will it end?