Here’s a paradox worth revisiting as I sit here paralyzed with a mean case of writer’s block/procrastination fly trap: more people commit suicide in locales that self-identify as “happy.” Like Utah, which is full of happy jerks being athletic and having great diets and a fulfilling spiritual life. If you’ve never spent much time in the Salt Lake City suburbs, it’s a bit like an Applebee’s commercial crossed with an REI store. It’s also beautiful and fairly clean-feeling.But, then again, there’s also a giant dead lake right there that’s inhabited mainly by sea monkeys and flies. A lot of people kill themselves in Utah too: the state has the ninth highest suicide rate in the country, according to a 2011 study in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization; meanwhile, it’s ranked number one in “life satisfaction.”State by state, the pattern maintains. New York is miserable, ranking 45th in life-satisfaction — yet it has the lowest suicide rate in the nation. Even when you adjust for differences in age, gender, race, education, income, marital status, and employment status you wind up with the same positive correlation. In the author’s words, “the paradoxical positive relationship between state life‐satisfaction and state suicides that is seen in raw, unadjusted data appears to be genuine; it is not due to confounding caused by differences in population characteristics across states.” Interestingly, the correlation seems to hold across Western nations.Read the rest over at Motherboard.
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