In general,

The one who suicides: Who thinks continuing their life is not worth. Now, why suicide? What I see is, these are some of the main reasons why one suicides-

Depression / love-betray / poverty / health & diseases / mentally-unstable

According to me,

The one who suicides: I will say they are scared rather judging them if they have enough happiness in their life or not. They are scared to face situation, to face the huge wave of life where they are swept from one corner to other and again scared to start walking to catch their previous stage of life. Scared the ups & downs of life. Scared to understand the mysterious puzzle of life.

I am not against euthanasia but I think it's only for those whose struggle will not change anything in future "a short stay in Switzerland"- Simon Curtis(biography), for instance.

Now, the cause of increasing suicide rates in Switzerland
reason is Depression
This has been the most likely reason affecting increasing suicide rate in Switzerland.

Are Swiss unhappy?
No, they are not unhappy they are alone. (sorry if it sounds fictitious or obnoxious)

Hello! life is just for once. Their is no backward/ pause/ forward buttons. Enjoy what you are, where you are and what you have

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These data by the WHO do not stratify (or adjust) for the fact that assisted suicide is legal here, thus people who *commit* suicide might be terminal diseased people, also it is well known that people come here from other parts of the world to have assited suicide so these rates could be biased.
Also, Switzerland seems to be in position 23, top 4th.

How can one extrapolate the actions of a few to mean the feelings of the majority?

Actually, suicide rates have been (slightly) decreasing in Switzerland for the past 30 years. Specifically, male suicides have decreased since 1980 while female suicides have (slightly) increased. The "interesting" phenomenon is that suicide rates for adults that are under 80 years old have decreased, while there is a significant increase for those over 80.

I'm led to believe that Swiss coroners enter auto-asphyxiation deaths as "suicides" to protect the families of those involved. Not being an expert on the subject, I would imagine nations considering similar deaths in this way to be "accidental" rather than "suicides".

Clearly there won't be any statistics to back this up for Switzerland, but maybe they really are the happiest nation alive, they might just be living out their sex lives a little too close to the edge.

You might have a higher suicide rate but the those who remain might be a lot happier (however you want to measure it) than a country with a lower rate. Or it might be that suicide is culturally or legally proscribed elsewhere. Is there a point to this?

Actually, women try to kill themselves more often than men. But as they (usually) choose less drastic methods (medicaments) than the men (shooting, hanging etc) the are much more likely to survive the attempts.

So they prefer the drama and sympathy than the result?

Totally agreed. I've even seen few girls threatening their partner that they will commit suicide if he ever going to betray. However, this never happens.

While I would put it differently, that is IMHO part of the explanation.

The discrepancy between the sexes is very high for young adults (15 to 24 years), where attempts by females are more than twice as common as those by males. These young people may act much more on impulse and do not have (a good thing) the knowledge about lethal doses etc.

So some of these attempts may well be more about a "cry for help" than a clear decision to end ones life. However, these attempts should not be seen as silliness by the young, as chances are high the there will be more attempts later on, and sooner or later, they will succeed.

After the age of about 50, attempts by males are more common and more successful.

Is there a correlation between suicide/alcoholism/winter daylight hours? That's where I would start, and then look at the outlayers.

i think the entire premise of using suicide rates as a barometer for happiness is flawed at the outset. you can be unhappy without committing suicide.

A couple of people have asked "how do we measure happiness." Unless I have missed seeing it, noone has brought up the concept of GNH - Gross National Happiness. I know very little about it ( would love a summary from someone who knows more) but didn't Bhutan officially include GNH in measuring how well the country is doing, as oppossed to just the conventional GNP of a country?

So a country with more less happy people can be just as happy as a smaller country of much happier people?

Maybe it's only the healthy older people out hiking in the hills that are actually happy and the people offing themselves are the young people who smoke too much.

Uuu.... are you someone who knows more about the concept than I do? I don't know how GNH is measured, but I am sure the maths involves percentages somewhere.

This index is based on that way of looking at things. I studied it for a while but it is really pretty iffy and is very polarised towards a set-up like Bhutan where it originated. I don't put very much store in the whole concept and have not found a whole lot of good anthropological evidence that it makes a good long term measure of social health and/or happiness.]

Measuring happiness by the number of people not killing themselves sounds pretty bloody depressive to start with.

Great to see that EF has vastly evolved and improved since then...

Back to hand-bag fighting.

I agree Colin - difficult to mathematically measure happiness - but I like the idea of it (somehow) being an acknowledged way to measure the success of a country or community.