Researchers who study how people's sense of well-being varies from place to place decided to compare their findings with suicide rates.
The surprising result: The happiest places sometimes also have the highest suicide rates.
"Discontented people in a happy place may feel particularly harshly treated by life," suggested Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England.
Or, put another way by co-author Stephen Wu of Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., those surrounded by unhappy people may not feel so bad for themselves.
Hmmm. Maybe that explains it.
Or maybe surveys of the happiness of living people mean that where unhappy people are more likely to kill themselves that the resulting polling data skews to happier people?
Just a statistical thought. I had but one introductory statistics class in college, so I claim no particular expertise.
