The Truth About Holiday Depression
If you Google “Holiday” and “Depression,” you’d think the vast majority of us fall into a deep funk during this time of merry celebration:
Holiday Anxiety and Depression: Click for Survival Tips
Holiday Depression: How to Beat the Holiday Blues this Christmas
11 Tips for Avoiding Holiday Depression Triggers
It goes on and on. Literally hundreds of websites offer tips, remedies and solutions to this supposed horrendous problem.
Here’s one of my favorites, posted this week on walb.com:
“Depression and suicide cases rise during the holiday season.
The Behavior Health Center at Phoebe is combating the illness with a new stimulation machine.
It is called the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation machine, also known as TMS.
It uses magnetic energy to stimulate areas of the brain that are affected by depression.”
This is just one example. An analysis by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania found that, as recently as 2013, 70 percent of news articles on suicide claimed that depression and suicide rates rise during the winter holidays.
It is simply not true.
In fact, there is a lot of evidence that fewer people report to psychiatric emergency rooms just before Christmas than at any other times of the year. And according to recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide rates are at their lowest in December.
We’ve actually known this for a long time. Research dating back to the 1980s and conducted across the globe has found again and again that Christmas is associated with a decrease in suicide.
So why is the holiday suicide myth so persistent in the face of all of this evidence?
It’s a serious question, because this kind of inaccurate reporting reinforces a false belief that may hamper suicide prevention and education efforts by misleading people and causing them to imitate a deadly trend that doesn’t exist.
I wonder if the myth persists because Christmas itself is a holiday built on grand mythologies. It comes packaged in over 2,000 years of some of the world’s most enduring exaggerations, fictions and outright lies. From the origin of Christmas itself, to the exact historical date of Jesus’ birth, to the current-day marketing of good ole St. Nick, much of what people believe to be true about Christmas is simply false.
Some of the myths are harmless.
But maybe it’s time to let go of one of the potentially most damaging myths: Suicide and depression rates really are at their lowest during the winter holidays.
