I stopped believing in God in July 2013. In the first 3 months or so I felt liberated and relieved that I can live my life anyway I wanted without worrying about an invisible being watching my every move. I also felt slightly superior that I was able to figure out that God isn't real while the majority of mankind continued to be fooled. Atfer the feelings of excitment statrted to wear off, I started to become more depressed and empty. It wasn't until 6 months or so after becoming an atheist that I realized that I'm sadder than I ever been in my life. I thought these were just my personal feelings and that most atheist remain happy, I found out however that this isn't the case.
I'm taking a sociology course this semester and we are discussing Emile Durkheim's study of suicide. Durkheim hypothesized on different variables that increased a person's likelihood of committing suicide. One of the variables was being an atheist. I was shocked to see that regardless of whether or not a country was rich or poor, if it contained a high percentage of atheist, it also had a high(>10 per 100,000) suicide rate. Countries such as China, South Korea, Japan, France, Finland, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Canada all have significantly higher suicide rates than poor religious countries such as Haiti, Jamaica, Syria, Egypt, Peru, Pakistan, Jordan, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela. The fact that people living in countries with low crime, a good ecomony, excellent schools, and good healthcare were killing themselves 10 to 30 times more often than people living in countries with no job, no education, hardly any food, and no healthcare is a powerful testimony of the benefits of believeing in God.
Another studied showed that atheist are also more depressed than religious people and don't give nearly as much money to charity as religious people. After being an atheist for 7 months, I can say that at least in my case these studies have been very accurate. I never suffered from major depression or been suicidal until I became an atheist. In general people who believe in God are much happier than athiest and their belief in God gives them strenght through tough times, which is why they can live peacefully in third world countries while atheist are killing themselves despite living in much better conditions.