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have you looked at atmospheric deposition of elemental mercury? Some places like Utah have a yearly deposition of enough mercury to cause hand tremors in dentists, who, in their golden days, had a disproportionately high amount of suicides, possibly due to mercury exposure

I pitched this as a study during my masters, where I would try to get access to the baseline data for the National Atmospheric deposition program maps, you can see here

http://nadp.slh.wisc.edu/data/annualmaps.aspx

Overlay that with suicide rates in a GIS program and see if anything statistically significant kicks out.

It appears that a stratified random sampling protocol for the country using piss tests for mercury could substantiate a relationship.

The problem is that suicide is a higher order condition, and the effects of mercury are an exacerbation of normal and common stress, bipolar, etc. symptoms found in people. So making the correlation without a biomarker tying them to exposure is almost worthless.

So if you got any environmental toxicology folks who are good at getting grant funding, this is an exciting potential option.

He hired a sherpa to answer all the questions for him to make sure that it was safe.