Utah. “This is the place,” I am told. The Promised Land.

Utah boasts low crime rates, healthy residents, and the highest literacy and language fluency rates in the country. And yes, it is also true that Utah is the #1 state for Jell-O consumption.

But all is not well in Zion.

Behind its glossy façade, Utah hides some ugly truths. The state is plagued by drug abuse, depression, suicide, and sexual violence.

Last weekend, I traveled to Salt Lake to see Happy Valley, a local documentary that exposes the epidemic of drug abuse, namely of prescription drugs, in Utah. The film follows several Utah families whose lives have been devastated or dramatically affects by prescription drug abuse. Each personal story is compelling, but what really hit me is how wide-spread the problem is.

According to a study by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Utah leads the country in non-medical painkiller abuse. Of Utahns age 12 or older, 6.5 percent used a prescription pain medication without a doctor’s order in the past year. And in the past five years, 1300 Utahns have died of prescription drug overdoses.

So while our university has a manic fixation on smoking, smoking appears to be the least of Utah’s drug problems.

Most importantly, Happy Valley explores the cultural issues of denial, conformity, social pressure and guilt that underlie the state’s drug problem (among others). One addict said that recovery in Utah is especially difficult because our society is so judgmental—people don’t want to be honest and open about their addictions for fear of how others might perceive them. He asked that Utahns “look in the mirror, before looking out the window.”

Happy Valley is a powerful experience. By the movie’s end, there was not a dry eye in the theater. I cried so much, in fact, that I nearly had to wring my beard dry. I know I’m not a film critic for the Statesman, but, for what it’s worth, I think you need to see it.

The movie’s scope, though, is limited. First, it doesn’t adequately address meth use in Utah. Nearly 36 percent of Utahns in treatment for illegal drugs are addicted to meth. And second, drug abuse is just one of many serious problems confronting Utah. Another issue for the state is its obscene suicide and depression rates.

Utah leads the nation in youth suicides. And disproportionately represented in these suicides are gay youth. Gay teens are three to five times more likely to commit suicide. Since 1965, for example, nearly 40 gay students at BYU have taken their lives. Overall, Utah had the 7th highest suicide rates in the country from the years 2000-2004.

As for depression: Utah doesn’t just lead the U.S. in antidepressant use; it leads the world.

There are special features or “risk factors” which help explain Utah’s high suicide and depression rates.

Easy access to firearms exacerbates Utah’s suicide problem. According to the Utah Department of Health, half (53%) of all suicides in Utah were committed with a firearm—more than suffocation/hanging and poisoning combined.

Country music, believe it or not, has been found to increase suicide rates as well. According to sociologists Steven Stack and Jim Gundlach, country music “nurtures a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population, such as marital discord, alcohol abuse, and alienation from work…The greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate.”

Chief among the risk factors for suicide is an unwillingness to seek help due to the stigma attached mental disorders like depression.

“We have this ‘All is well in Zion’ kind of thing going here,” Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said.

“We’d rather not talk about [depression] at all or maybe to go talk to the bishop about it,” he said. “If there really is a mental health issue you need help. It doesn’t work to talk to the youth leaders or ecclesiastic leaders.”

To be fair, a couple of the aforementioned risk factors are not unique to Utah. Indeed, rural areas in general (and the Rocky Mountain region in particular) have markedly higher suicide rates than the rest of the U.S. Utah’s rate is nonetheless alarming. And we must pay particular attention to this issue now, given that suicide rates are highest in the spring.

In rape, too, Utah exceeds the national average. One in eight Utah women will be raped at some point in their lifetime. And sadly, few rapes will be reported.

A recent report by the Deseret Morning News found that 90 percent of Provo rapes go unreported. A BYU police officer explained that “most Provo residents are religious and have a tendency to stigmatize discussion of sexual assault and sometimes to demonize the survivor.” And I wonder whether the rapes themselves result, in part, from our unhealthy climate of sexual repression.

None of this should be read as an attack on the LDS church per se. But these grim realities do serve as an indictment of Utah’s cloistered culture.

Ignorance is not bliss; too often, as evidenced by Utah, ignorance is dangerous.