Tampa Bay Most Stressful Metropolitan Area

City-data.com Photo of Downtown Tampa

Ham on Wry reported in a previous blog post that St. Petersburg, Florida was the saddest city in America. Evidently, when sadness morphs to stress, it affects the entire Tampa Bay Area negatively and earns it the number one spot for most stressful metropolitan area of the fifty studied by Sperling's Best Places.

The study considered many factors that contribute to stress, such as divorce rate, commute times, unemployment, violent crime, property crime, suicides, alcohol consumption, mental health, sleep troubles, and the annual amount of cloudy days. This blogger had no idea that the area experiences 127 cloudy days per year and has a suicide rate of 15.5 per 100,000 residents. In a populations of 2,780, 818, that equates to 434 suicides each year.

Listed in order Tampa/St. Pete/Clearwater ranked as the most stressful metropolitan area; Las Vegas/Paradise, Nevada ranked second (Paradise might want to reconsider its name); Miami/Miami Beach/Kendall, Florida placed third; Jacksonville, Florida was fourth; and Detroit, Michigan came in at fifth.

Ham on Wry challenges local and state politicians to weigh in on this study and the one of saddest cities. As Ricky Ricardo frequently said to Lucy, "You got some 'splain' to do.