Living in rural areas better for mental health than living in the city

Great! But something like 86% of the USA population lives in an urban area, and a large chunk of the "rural" zones are very close to a city and to my mind aren't rural at all. Since there's no official definition of rural, I think it's safe to assume that a lot of "rural", isn't.

Since we overwhelmingly choose urban life, I have to wonder why we glorify rural life, subsidizing family farms, and indeed, any farm. Including why post articles like this? What's the motive for posting this? To make sure the urban residents don't feel like "real Americans", I reckon. To make sure that the "real American" rural residents don't question things like gerrymandering, Electoral College, and US Senate that give them more power than they would get in a more democratic arrangement.

If you extrapolate the charts, it looks like if they simply waited one more year the mental health benefits would be the same.

Moving to a less green area appears to be accompanied by an immediate drop in mental health, followed by a steady increase. The only difference from those charts when moving to the rural areas is that there is no immediate drop, which appears to account for all the difference. And the mental health benefits of rural areas appears to plateau, so it's completely possible that the move to the less green area will catch up in the mental health benefit aspect within the year.

At the same time rural areas (at least where I live) are very clearly ahead in per capita suicide rates.

Furthermore this study doesn't seem to take into consideration or try to account for why people where moving. The life situations that lead to you making the move in either direction tend to be very different.