The story made NPR a couple years ago.
Las Vegas: The Suicide Capital Of America
by MICHELLE TRUDEAU
In Las Vegas, the odds of dying by suicide are strikingly high —
twice as high as in the rest of the country. And the neon city is
a risk for residents and visitors alike, according to a study in the current issue of the journal Social Science and Medicine.
Matt Wray lives in Philadelphia and works as a sociologist at Temple University. He used to live in Las Vegas, and says
he was struck by the city's historically high suicide rate of about one suicide per day.
It made Wray wonder whether exposure to the city of Las Vegas — not just its gambling casinos, but the whole town — increases the risk of suicide. It was a question he and colleagues from Harvard University tackled by looking at 40 million death records from across the country, spanning 30 years.
"Those deaths included about 600,000 suicides," Wray said.
Suicide records tell you not only how someone died, but where — whether at home, out of town or out of state.
"So we're comparing, in this case, Las Vegas to every place else," Wray said.
Indeed, researchers found that residents of Las Vegas had a 50 percent higher risk of suicide than folks living elsewhere in the country. They also found out something quite surprising about the residents.
"Residents of Las Vegas who leave Las Vegas — that is, they take some kind of hiatus or break from Las Vegas, they go out of the county — their risk for suicide goes down," he said.
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98042717 (Archive copy)
