Sunshine can’t solve everything, it seems.
A new report from researchers with Tulane University’s State of the Nation Project paints a troubling portrait of hopelessness, depression and grief in the sunny Land of Enchantment.
The new “State of the States” report, released earlier this month, analyzed three decades of data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia to find New Mexico ranks in the bottom third in key measures of mental health, life satisfaction and social capital.
The report isn’t meant to just highlight where states like New Mexico are going wrong, said Douglas Harris, director of the State of the Nation Project and an economics professor at Tulane. It’s also a call to action for policymakers to work to make things better.
“We were motivated by the 250th anniversary of the United States,” Harris said in a recent interview. “We should be learning from each other — that ‘laboratory of democracy’ idea. … It’s meant to motivate people to act and to focus on the most important challenges that we face.”
It’s not unusual for New Mexico to appear at or near the bottom of nationwide rankings on a variety of social issues. The state just relinquished its long-held, last-place spot in nationwide child well-being data.
Still, New Mexico’s showing in the State of the States report offers a grim picture of residents’ well-being. New Mexico ranked 36th in depression (and 45th in depression among youth), 43rd in life expectancy, 45th in fatal overdoses, 47th in suicide rates and 48th in volunteerism.
The researchers’ findings echo some of the public safety concerns New Mexico policymakers have long voiced, with the state ranking 49th in murder rates and 47th in shootings.
Tellingly, New Mexico also ranked 45th in social isolation, a measure intended to calculate the percentage of adults who aren’t getting the social and emotional support they need on a regular basis.
Those benchmarks of mental well-being have massive implications for public health. Gabrielle Dietrich, executive director of the New Mexico chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a statewide mental health advocacy organization, connected the issue to potentially traumatic events known as adverse childhood experiences — such as violence at home or in the community, substance use issues and instability due to parental separation or incarceration — that can worsen mental and physical health outcomes later in life.
New Mexico, like several other states in the Mountain West, tends to have particularly high rates of people who have experienced two or more adverse childhood experiences, according to data from the State Health Access Data Assistance Center.
That level of childhood trauma makes a difference, Dietrich said.
“That is a really big deal, and I think that that has a huge influence not just on what’s happening today, but what has stacked up over the course of generations,” she said.
Here’s the good news: The state has seen some significant movement in recent years on behavioral health reform efforts. The Legislature passed a series of bills in 2025 aimed at improving access to mental health and substance use treatment services in the state.
Right now, though, New Mexico is in what Dietrich called the “messy middle” of turning those policy changes into action.
“We’re in Act 2 right now, and things get sticky in Act 2,” she said. “While we know what the problem is and we’re trying to address it, this is where it’s hard — and this is also where the good work happens.”
There are a few bright spots in the State of the Nation data, too.
New Mexico’s economic output is growing, and it ranked eighth nationwide in labor productivity. Measures of the state’s environment — including air quality and net greenhouse gas emissions — were near the middle of the pack, as was voter participation and child mortality.
Harris’ advice given this data: “Focus on the things that you have some authority over.”
A pediatrician might focus on improving low birth weight, for instance, while social workers improve youth mental health, and charitable organizations take aim at increasing volunteerism.
“There’s way too much here for any one person to try to attack them all, but maybe just pick one and focus on that and see if you can make progress on that,” Harris said. “[We’re] certainly not trying to overwhelm or depress, but also trying to paint a realistic picture of where we stand.”
On an individual level, positive person-to-person interactions can wear away some of the isolation that’s getting New Mexicans down, Dietrich said. She called community “the antidote to isolation.”
“We didn’t get here overnight, and it’s not going to get fixed overnight, either,” Dietrich said. “So, I think being patient, being reflective, being a listener, this is the way.”
