The "study" suggests a deep-seated flaw in its nature and maybe other "studies", as well.

It claims to be looking at "happy" states, states where there is an overwhelming sense of well-being among the residents. But, if so many people were so desperately unhappy, they would show up in the results that were compiled to rate the states as "happy". Did the "study" ranking "happiness" work in terms of total number of people who described themselves as content, or in averaging some arbitrary contentment rating individuals gave themselves? In the first, the number of people miserable enough to commit suicide would have brought the population of content people down in number, in the other, content people may have assigned themselves contentment ratings far, far higher than were valid. There is also the possibility that the "happiness" the first "study" assayed was the shallow, material goods driven sense of comfort without profound satisfaction that often masks deep-seated despair in many. This last has long been recognized as existing among many of those who call themselves affluent and a significant cause of self-destructive behavior by them. It also calls into question the "misery loves company" interpretation. In states with high suicide rates, even though they also supposedly boast the most "happy" people, the large number of suicides means there are many other people who share depressed individuals' sadness, so they should not be driven to suicide. In fact, the conclusion seems borne out that the "happiness" rating "study" was itself flawed and only counted what respondents wanted to call "happiness", which varied widely between them. Many of these seem to have defined simple material wealth as "happiness", and they seem to be the ones who committed many of the suicides in those states.

In actuality, this only demonstrates how bad mush "experimentation" is. In many cases, the "researchers" decide what they want an "experiment" to say and design it appropriately. For example, a "study" claimed to "prove" that use of hand held phones while driving "causes" accidents. The "researchers" "defined" a cell phone to be "instrumental" in causing an accident if it was used within ten minutes of the accident occurring. That means that you can take a cell phone call at a restaurant, get in your car, drive a distance without using the cell phone, then have some politico's kid high on cocaine plow into you and the cell phone would be blamed! Gary Wells from Iowa State University made himself a darling of cirminals by claiming photo book identification of cirminals tended to make people blur details. He suggested showing one photo after another, letting the person study it for a minute, then moving to the next photo. He claimed his method "decreased the number of false convictions. It didn't increase correct convicitions, it simply bored the witness so they finally just gave up. And no identificiation surely does avoid wrong identificiations! Wells' method has not increased the efficiency of arresting criminals! ANd And Aaron Clauset and Maxwell Young jumped on the "terrorism" bandwagon to fame by claiming they discovered "terrorist' attacks obey a power law. But, a power law means the logarithms of values follow a straight line, and logarithms "squash" data so even a weird curve could look like a straight line! There has been a massive effort at distorting if not completely denying the truth to swindle the public.

The fact that suicide rates were not corrected for is obvious in that Nevada is listed on the "high" side. A lot of suicides (and murders made to look like suicides) happen around all the gambling in the state. Long-term depression and the downer caused by losing a lot of money at the BlackJack table are completely different things.

Many people who suffer depression severe enough to lead to suicide also may have big emotional swings - appearing very cheerful and energetic in front of others. It's possible that states with this correlation simply have more people who are bipolar. Or they could be totally unrelated and influenced more by something else, like environmental contaminants, or it's just a coincidence.

Not to mention that a lot of people lie or use their momentary emotional state when asked directly in a survey, and it takes more subtle questions to gauge how happy they REALLY are.

As the first commenter noted, taking a bunch of points and saying "look, this must cause that!" is too simplistic to be of any real value. Maybe this report does better at filtering the data than I'm giving it credit for, but of course I can't know that because there's no link to the original paper!

Talk about misery. Just look at the libfest called Newsvine.

Just let GAYS marry let them be as Miserable as the rest of us

Misery loves company ? Get married and find out

"I was married by a Judge..I should have asked for a JURY" Groucho Marx

the company I work for..really loves misery

Misery loves company and Companies love misery

Misery does like company, example. The reason domestic violence is so high is because he/she picks the wrong mate. A person that is trouble always seems to pick one almost exactly the same type, if the person is miserable they are attracted to the same type. In both situations its like dynamite meeting dynamite just waiting to explode. In both case there can be a fight which will lead to a confrontation but yet they get back together just to do it over and over again, until someone is put in jail only to start it over again, or someone will get severely injured or kill in which case someone will end up in jail. Its amazing how many men and women like people that have no promise, future or stability. They would rather live a life of hardship, dysfunction and despair. You cut domestic violence by training, and teaching males/females that they don’t have to just settle, wait to find someone that you want to spend time with. Violence is not the answer to anything, its just the destruction of someone life.

Er...maybe people in NY who want to commit suicide just run through a high crime area with $100s sticking out of their pockets? Or get killed by traffic 'accidents'? Seems like it is counter-intuitive that a big city would have less suicides. But...a big city having more suicides that looked like accidents makes perfect sense. If it's really easy to kill yourself (or get someone else to do it) you don't have to hang yourself with piano wire.