Hurrah! It's the most depressing day of the year

by Rob Peters | January 21, 2008 at 01:34 pm | 914 views | 6 comments

It's pitch dark both to and fro work, your Christmas bills are due, and to stay warm you need to dress like a shapeless lump of wool. Yes, today is the most depressing day of the year.

A Cardiff University researcher came up with Jan. 21/08 as the exact date by looking at factors such as weather, Christmas debt, and failed New Year's resolutions. It's a theory most academics don't take very seriously, but on an unscientific, gut level, I'd say it feels about right.

The article that follows takes a different approach and looks at our Googling habits to see if we're as seritonin-starved as the research would suggest.

Hint: if your last three searches were "Wellbutrin," "counselling: is it right for me?," and "somebody save me for the love of God," you're probably a little blue.

There's a lot to feel down about this month: the subprime mortgage crisis, stormy, unpredictable weather, rising gas prices, presidential primary free-for-alls. So, it would be easy to believe the theory set forth by Dr. Cliff Arnall, a researcher from Cardiff University, that the third Monday of the month (Jan. 21, this year) — a day he calls Blue Monday — will be our most depressing day of the year. Arnall bases his yearly prediction on a formula he developed, which factors in the weather, consumer debt from holiday spending and failed New Year's resolutions and arrives at that conclusion that we'll hit rock bottom on Monday the 21st.

To confirm this timing I took a look from a different perspective. If we're depressed, we're probably also seeking pharmacological help. By aggregating the traffic to the websites of the top antidepressants and charting visits to those sites over the last three years, a very interesting pattern emerges. The spike in traffic to the official websites for drugs like Lexapro, Prozac, Paxil and Cymbalta occurs in late October and early November, two weeks ahead of the height in searches on "depression." It's almost as if people anticipate their holiday depression and start shopping early for their drug of choice.

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Swan

at 14:03 on January 21st, 2008

Hello Rob!

Interesting story, though I feel it's just so much hype for the sake of a story by the original author. It's impossible to determine the "most depressing day of the year," by search results alone.

What about those who are already on anti-depressants?

What about all the people that go to their doctors for diagnoses and medication, who don't use search engines?

And such stories cater heavily to hypochondriacs, who will read the article and then determine that they too, are depressed.

I don't like sensationalism for it's own sake. This is not a comment about you Rob, but about the original writer.
~ Swan

Rob Peters

at 14:45 on January 21st, 2008

Hi Swan,

Yeah I agree, it's silly to predict the most depressing anything with any degree of accuracy. I assume the original researcher who came up with the theory had a sense of humour about his work, but you never know I suppose.

I thought the article presented a fun thought to consider, especially when taken with a grain of salt.

Incidentally, it's sunny in Vancouver today, and I'm not depressed. You?