Does higher GDP per capita lower suicide rates?

Some people argue that money can buy happiness. Some argue that it can’t. But what does the data surrounding the relationship between GDP per capita and suicide rates tell us about this?

I collected data from Kaggle that has a suicide rates overview from 1985 to 2016 and allows the user to compare socio-economic indicators with suicide rates for just over 100 countries. This data set can be found here: https://www.kaggle.com/russellyates88/suicide-rates-overview-1985-to-2016. This data also breaks down each year by gender and age group, but to simplify the analysis and look at these rates more in the aggregate, I uploaded the data into Tableau for further analysis.

In this analysis, I looked at both an overall look of all countries in the data set averaged over all of the years in the data set and a closer look at the trends for three of the richest and 3 of the poorest countries in the dataset in terms of GDP per capita.

In the overall analysis, I was curious if, at an overall level, there appeared to be any correlation between GDP per capita and suicide rates.

After seeing this analysis, I wanted to dive deeper and see if there were any trends that could be seen between years in the richest and poorest countries.

Through each of these analyses, there was not any evidence that higher GDP can lead to lower suicide levels, so if suicide rates are being used as a proxy for happiness, on an aggregate level, this analysis leads to the conclusion that wealth cannot lead to happiness.