Human well‐being is increasingly studied in science and social science [1‐7]. A common claim of many countries and even states within the U.S. is that they are filled with happy and/or satisfied people. Rankings from the World Values Survey and the U.S. General Social Survey frequently appear in the press—and more scholarly outlets—where we learn that Danes, Swedes, and the Swiss are among the most satisfied people in Europe and that it may be better to reside in Alaska than in California [2,8].

A rarely‐noted difficulty is that these notably ‘happy’ places have high rates of suicide. While this puzzling fact has been remarked on occasionally for individual nations, especially for the case of Denmark, it has been attributed in an anecdotal way to idiosyncratic features of the location in question (e.g., the dark winters in Scandinavia), problems or variations in measurement of well‐being and/or suicide, or differences in culture and attitudes regarding happiness and taking one’s life. Few scholars have thought of the anecdotal observation as a systematic relationship robust to replication and investigation.

A further, and potentially related, empirical issue has been discussed but never resolved in the literature on the epidemiology of suicide. There is no known explanation for the statistical evidence that suicide rates drop during wartime [9‐11].

A possible cross‐country association between happiness and suicide has been mentioned, albeit in passing, in innovative previous work examining whether survey data on subjective well‐being might be used as tractable markers of population mental health [12].

Other research has examined the spatial patterns in suicide [eg. 13].