Stop Smiling At Me!

Written by craig

 I just ran across a study that proves something I'd suspected for years: happiness kills!

This one comes from . . . drum roll please . . . the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Mary Daly from the FRB and her buddies came up with what I think was a truly brilliant idea. They looked at data on life satisfaction differences between the states within the US and found which states seemed to have the happiest folks. Then, they pulled up the suicide data for those same states.

'Know what they found? You guessed it. On average, the places where people were happiest were the same places where others were most likely to kill themselves. (Of course, Hawaii was the one exception where people were both happy and desirous of remaining alive.)

Why? Well, the researchers theorized that when people who are depressed look around and see that everyone else really is happier than they are, the isolation grows, the loneliness deepens, and the sorrow overwhelms. 

It's a common practice in mental health to encourage depressed individuals to get out with friends, to have fun, to stop holing up in the apartment. That  still might be good advice, but I wonder.

If one doesn't tackle the biological underpinnings of the pain, if one is merely thrust into a setting where she/he truly is more miserable than everyone else . . . perhaps a safer idea would be the suggestion that they move to Ethiopia. They still might die early, but it probably won't be from suicide.

God bless.