Suicide Rates in Happy Places: Is There a Paradox?

• In Event: Risk Factors for Mental Illness

Abstract

In 2011 Daly et al. published findings suggesting that states in the U.S. that had the highest average life-satisfaction also tended to have the highest rates of suicide. They proposed that relative comparisons may be especially problematic in such geographic areas and that the cost of being unhappy may be even higher when surrounded by happy people. In the current work we reexamine this possibility at a lower level of geographic aggregation and while including additional covariates in the model. Our findings suggest that this paradox may not be as clear as originally proposed. In addition to shedding new light and the extant work we offer a number of suggestions for more clearly explicating this potential paradox.

Authors

• Tim Wadsworth, University of Colorado Boulder

• Philip Pendergast, University of Colorado Boulder

• Charis Kubrin, University of California, Irvine