Suicide rates in Denmark:  10.6 out of 100,000 (making it number 40 out of the top countries for suicide).  This puts it 44% below average.  In comparison, the US is number 39 on the list, with rates of 11.1 per 100,000 people.

Approximately 15% of Danes are diagnosed with depression at some point.  In comparison, in the US the number is a bit over 26%.

Denmark is number 36 in the world for length of life, being only a few years behind the leading countries and over four decades ahead of many others.  The US is about equal.

Denmark has a relative poverty rate of 4.8%, a low rate.  In comparison, the US has one of 15.1% (as well as having the largest gap between wealthy incomes and poor incomes, as well as between health benefits given to the rich compared to health benefits to the poor).

Out of 191 nations, Denmark is ranked by the WHO as:

65th in overall health (putting it in above about 66% of the rest of the world)
34th for health system performance (putting it above about 82% of the rest of the world)
28th for Disability Adjusted Life Expectancy (putting it above about 85% of the rest of the world)
21st for health distribution (putting it above about 89% of the rest of the world)
4th in the level of responsiveness (putting it above about 98% of the rest of the world)
3rd to 38th in the distribution of responsiveness (putting it above 80 to 98% of the rest of the world)
3rd to 5th in fairness of financial contribution (putting it above about 98% of the rest of the world)
20th at overall goal attainment (putting it above about 90% of the rest of the world)

So relatively, the Danes have low poverty and low suicide rates, while having high health and an effective and efficient health care system.  All of which means that there’s no reason according to statistics to declare the Danes to be “unhappy” (heck, if any nation is unhappy, it would have to be the US according to some of these numbers).  All of which fits in perfectly with people’s personal experiences in Danmark and with Danes.

So while saying that any nation is “happy” is somewhat meaningless, it seems that the Danes in general are as happy as anybody else, and a lot happier than many other nations.

handsomeguy123 - 01 March 2011 02:23 AM

The reality is far different from your “Happy Denmark” delusional world where everyone is smiling and planting flowers. The reality is that a majority of the citizens of Denmark are mentally ill, the healthcare system is falling apart as people are being denied vital treatments. There isn’t anything superior or extraordinary about Denmark, I’m afraid. I am sorry to disappoint you, but this is the definitive proof that Denmark is not the happiest place on earth.

You’re the only one going on about Danmark being “the happiest place on Earth”.  I don’t know of anybody else who has said anything like that.  Especially since that’s pretty much a meaningless phrase.

What everybody (other than you) is saying is that the Danes don’t appear to be any unhappier than anybody else.  You, on the other hand, have apparently decided for whatever weird reason that the Danes are all basically listlessly roaming the streets in despair when they’re not simply rotting away in useless hospitals.  Which is total rubbish.  Actual direct observation and experience goes against your claims.  All these various statistics and whatnot either go against your claims or don’t really say much of anything at all.

It’s not that we’re all “deluded” into the idea that Danmark is “the happiest place on Earth” where they’re all “smiling and planting flowers”.  We’re saying that it’s just a normal country.  It’s you who seems to be deluded, insisting that it’s basically a nation in collapse with everybody writhing in torment.  I don’t know just what your problem is, but you’re misrepresenting the people who are disagreeing with you as well as what the situation in Danmark actually appears to be.  And your stock response of “well, the Danish conspiracy must have gotten to you” is just stupid.

handsomeguy123 - 01 March 2011 02:23 AM

There is no reason for you to get angry and vulgar, unless you are from Denmark.

Which I am not. Have been there though, hence know the country and its inhabitants by personal experience

The reality is that a majority of the citizens of Denmark are mentally ill, the healthcare system is falling apart

Both your statements here are nowhere grounded in facts. Show me a scientific study which proves your argument that the majority of Danish citizens is mentally ill. Show me hard figures that their healthcare system is falling apart. So far you haven’t, you just put up a few selective quotes taken out of context.

And (to be generous) deliberately misinterpreted quotes at that.

Socioeconomic data like this is easy to get ahold of from government sources, freely available. You’ll note we’ve posted competing data. Have you got ANYTHING that shows that what you’re saying is anything less than your own wishful thinking?

Frankly, I wanna know why you hate the Danes so much. Were you bitten by a windmill as a young child?

handsomeguy123 - 01 March 2011 02:09 AM

Denmark is the country in the world where most citizens have to leave the labor market because of mental illnesses.
This discouraging fact is evident from a new comprehensive OECD-report, writes Berlingske.
The report reveals that when four Danes were approved for incapacity benefits or a flex job in 1995, the reason was mental illness in one out of four cases. Today every other person has a mental illness.

This makes Denmark the global front-runner of an international trend where more and more workers find themselves bedbound due to mental illness.

Every other person, that’s 50%. And no, this news article is very informative. It shows exactly how the situation is in Denmark and how the citizens feel.

It says nothing of what you pretend it says. It says that 1 in 4 of the people applying for incapacity benefits do so because of mental problems: not 1 in 4 of the general Danish population as you pretend.

Same for the “every other person”: as Madmouses link to the actual source of the figures makes clear, this is actually 1 out of 2 of young people applying for incapacity benefits (i.e., a subsection of the latter). Not 1 out of 2 people in the general Danish population. Not even 1 out of 2 people receiving benefits.

So your “50%” has no base at all in facts. It is based on a (deliberate?) misreading.

The link Madmouse provided shows that 10% to 11% of the Danish working age population receives an incapacity benefit. 1 out of 4 of these on average apparently is for mental reasons:

that is, it concerns about 2.5% (1/4th of 10%) of the Danish working population. That is nowhere near a considerable amount of the Danish population, as you claim.

Note: in the USA, 26% of the working population suffers from some form of mental ilness (Archives of General Psychiatry 62 (2005):617-27).

handsomeguy123 - 01 March 2011 02:09 AM

Madmouse - 01 March 2011 12:36 AM

That link is a tiny and uninformative news article. I found the document referenced (here) and it does not say what you claim it does.

That’s pathetic. Now you sank to a level where you are willing to lie.

Given what I point out in this post, it is clear who is pathetic in his claims, and lying: you.

Robin Bobcat - 01 March 2011 01:12 PM

Frankly, I wanna know why you hate the Danes so much. Were you bitten by a windmill as a young child?

Maybe a Dane ran off with his girlfriend….

I just wonder how unhappy (and mentally confused) a person you must be yourself to go on this kind of obsessive crusade against a notion that people of a certain nationality that isn’t yours are happy. That just isn’t very healthy.

handsomeguy123 - 19 September 2010 05:34 PM

Hi all

I was reading how the american medias are lying about Denmark, which they claim to be a happy country. They make this bold statement based on a small interview with 4-5 people, who were mostly americans or english, a few of them were most likely danish but they did not seem happy at all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTGKUwMegZ4

The Danes in that video looked happy enough to me.  Slightly self-conscious about having a camera stuck in their face, but happy.

Anyway, they claim that Denmark apparently is a happy country. The article can be found here.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5224306.stm

Hold on, you just said that the claims of the American media were based on an interview with four to five people.  Then, two sentences later, you link to a news article that very explicitly states that the claims are based on checking with at least 80,000 people, and a little more checking shows that the study in question involves the work of dozens of researchers.  In your very first four sentences on this topic, you already contradict yourself.

Anyway, a quick summary of the study mentioned in that article, since you seem to be very confused as to what it is about:

Basically, Prof. White writes that happiness is an unquantifiable property, and that it is basically impossible to really give a true measure of it.  But he also points out how it is important to governments and suchlike to know how happy people are, and so various proxy techniques have been created over the years to try to give an estimate of the overall level of happiness of a group of people.

The problem with those earlier techniques, he writes, is that they’re usually based just upon money.  Various researchers, however, have worked out that there are other aspects besides money that greatly influence people’s happiness.  Mainly, there are three factors.  The most important factor is health.  Of almost but not quite equal importance are wealth and access to basic education.

He concludes that by studying these three characteristics in a country, you can get a more accurate idea of the potential for happiness in that country.  Not a measure of how happy people actually are, but of the potential for happiness.  And that by using that system of measurement, the Danes end up having the country where the potential for happiness is highest.  So all the claims that the reports says that the Danes are

According to the danish news paper Politikken, Denmark has a low growth, due to the citizens being lazy, dumb, and paid too much in comparison for how much they work.

http://politiken.dk/newsinenglish/973440/denmarks-competitiveness-drops/

Does that article say that Danes are lazy?  Nope.  It doesn’t say anything remotely related to that.

Does that article say that Danes are dumb?  Nope.  It doesn’t say anything remotely related to that.

Does that article say that Danes are paid disproportionately too much?  Nope.  It says that productivity is low, and it also says that wages have increased.  But nowhere does it say that the wages are unjustified.

What the article does say is that in 2010 Denmark has dropped seven places on the World Competitiveness Survey, now being

Visiting Denmark, well it is mostly a dark, grey country with a lot of rain, and the summer is short.

And it also has lots of bright pleasant days, beautiful scenery, interesting places to visit, and friendly people.  It’s less rainy than most places that are considered to be

handsomeguy123 - 22 September 2010 02:04 PM

Well the only reason why they are happy is in that picture is because they are drunk, that is how people are in Denmark.

And here we have you making up stuff yet again.  You have absolutely no way whatsoever of being able to tell anything at all about how intoxicated the people in the photo are.  But you don’t want the people in the photo to be happy, and so you simply invent an excuse. 

I suggest that you got up from your chair and took a visit in Denmark, it is mostly a cold, dark and grey country - and you rarely see a smile.

You really seem to be hammering away at that line.  Even though it’s obviously false.  Believe it or not, repetition of falsehoods doesn’t magically turn them into truth.

Just take a walk down the streets of Copenhagen, you will see nothing but stone-faces, alcoholics and homeless people sitting around. The only people smiling in Denmark are the foreigners. Which is ironic since they aren’t danish at all.

I have walked down the streets of Copenhagen.  I’ve seen that your claims are false.

Oprah has this to do with all this: she is obviously a big name in the media, and to make sure that all these danish people who needed attention because their country is boring, obviously they hired her to do commercial for Denmark. Surely you must have seen the videos on YouTube with Oprah Winfrey doing commercial for Denmark. I wonder how much they paid her for it?

And here you revert again to that fantasy you created, where you take something that is actually evidence against your claims and simply invent scenarios that don’t actually fit in with reality but that let you pretend that you can ignore the evidence.

Another article claims that people in Denmark dies on the waiting lists for hospital treatments, but in these fake “Happy Denmark” videos, they claim that the reason why some people in Denmark are happy, is because of the free healthcare. Meanwhile, who are happy when they die on a waiting list? If that is being happy, then hell the people in Denmark have a weird way of being happy.

http://www.cancer.dk/Forskning/nyheder/forskningsnyheder+2007/ventelister+patient+doer.htm

Yes, people die before they can be treated for cancer in Denmark.  People die before they can be treated in the US.  People die before they can be treated in the UK.  People die before they can be treated in France.  People die before they can be treated in Swaziland.  People die before they can be treated in every single country on the planet.  That’s because no medical system is perfect.  But you don’t need to have a perfect medical system to be a nation that has more potential to be happy than any other nation.  All you need to do is to have a medical system that works, and that people are satisfied with.  And overall, the Danes are satisfied with their system.

That article says nothing about how many people die waiting for treatment in Denmark.  It says nothing about any sorts of rates of mortality.  It says that an international study has shown that waiting time makes things worse for treating cancer, so cancer patients anywhere need to be treated as soon as possible.

People actually leaves Denmark to get better treatments, some seeks help in China, USA & Germany.

And people in China, the USA and Germany travel to other countries to get treatment.  It doesn’t mean that the medical system at home is bad.

There are people who leaves Denmark and moves to Norway & Sweden instead, granted the hospitals and schools are terrible in Denmark.

And there are people who move from Norway and Sweden to Denmark.

handsomeguy123 - 22 September 2010 02:25 PM

Taken directly from the top of the article, ( copy pasted )

Kr