Well - Being and Social Capital : Does Suicide Pose a Puzzle ?

Well-Being and Social Capital: Does Suicide Pose a Puzzle? John F. Helliwell Abstract This paper has a double purpose: to see how well Durkheim’s (1897) findings apply a century later, and to see if the beneficial effects of social capital on suicide prevention are parallel to those already found for subjective well-being (Helliwell 2003). In the life satisfaction and social capital data, Scandinavian and other northern European countries register the highest values. On several occasions when I presented these results, members of the audience posed the following question: If people are so happy in Scandinavia, why is their suicide rate so high? This paper tries to answer this question by using the same global sample of countries to study the determinants of national suicide rates, separately by age and gender. The results show that more social capital and higher levels of trust are associated with lower national suicide rates, just as they are associated with higher levels of subjective well-being. Furthermore, there is a strong negative correlation between national average suicide rates and measures of life satisfaction.