Would you consider yourself a happy or sad person? If you’re living in Utah, recent studies have found you should be both. Utah has been ranked on a national scale for being the state with the highest rate of happiness as well as depression. So what’s going on in the Beehive State?
First, the good news. A 2008 Gallup poll ranked Utah at the top of the list for overall well-being when considering the factors of life evaluation, emotional health, work environment, physical health, healthy behaviors and access to basic necessities. The poll gathered data during a course of a year and interviewed more than 350,000 adults. The interviews were conducted on the telephone, with 1,000 calls being made per day, seven days a week.
And now, the bad news. Mental Health America, a health advocacy organization, ranked Utah as the most depressed state in the nation. Research reported 10.14 percent of adults in Utah to have suffered a depressive episode in the past year and 14.58 percent to have experienced serious psychological distress.
Although the conflicting conclusions might leave some scratching their heads, the makeup of the two studies offers some helpful insight. The Mental Health America study gathered data between 2002 and 2006. In order to measure the collective depression of a particular state, the organization collected data on the percentage of the adult population experiencing major depressive episodes, serious psychological distress, the average number of days in the past 30 days in which the population reported its mental health was not good and suicide rates.
The study found statistically significant associations between depression status and mental health resources, barriers to treatment, mental health treatment utilization and socioeconomic characteristics. Mental Health America concluded that those states in which people were more educated and able to access good mental health care had overall better mental health.
If both studies were conducted in a scientific and thorough manner, how could they have come to such drastically different conclusions? Perhaps it was the way in which researchers were collecting their data and who was funding the research in the first place.
Although the Gallup poll surveyed individuals on the phone, Mental Health America focused on hard numbers from data collected during a number of years. Actions often speak louder than words, and though people might have said they were happy to a pollster on the phone, they might have been battling depression behind closed doors.
A study published in 2008 regarding the geographic variation trends in prescription drug use named Utah as the state with the highest rate of antidepressant use. Interestingly enough, Mental Health America’s report was supported by an unrestricted educational grant from Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, now part of Pfizer, Inc., the manufacturer of popular antidepressants including Zoloft and Effexor XR.
Although studies of this nature tend to draw a lot of attention, one must take their overall findings with a grain of salt. Media sensationalism and publication biases are a reality in today’s world where it’s often difficult to distinguish between advertising and hard science.
So are we happy or sad? Who knows for certain. What we do know is that happiness is a subjective concept and depression is often hard to identify, making an effort to rank depression by state a lofty goal that might yield less-than-perfect results.