An alternative explanation is that cold places with long winters are depressing, and because they are depressing fewer people want to live there.

Alaskan winters are hard regardless of how many friends you have.

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themafia 6 hours ago | parent [-]

If you take a chart of population density, and overlay the chart of suicide rate, you'll see an exceedingly strong correlation. It does not follow weather patterns. Utah has 3x the problem relative to California, for example.

	▲	jeffbee 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah if you go to CDC WISQARS you can do fatal injury reports filtered by intent (suicide) and aggregated by urban/non urban geography. These differences are not small, they vary by factors or orders of magnitude in every state. It's not the weather.