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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America

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January 22nd, Most Depressing Day of the Year?

January 22, 2007

Dr. Cliff Arnall of Cardiff University in U.K. has developed an equation to predict the most depressing day of the year. Based on factors such as weather, unfulfilled New Year's resolutions, Debt and days since Christmas Arnall has declared today January 22nd as the most depressing day of the year (appropriately coined as Blue Monday).

I'm taking a contrarian position on this one.

The chart below is volume of searches on the term "depression" charted on a four week rolling average for curve smoothing.

While not a perfect proxy (a portion of depression searches, about 3% by my estimation in January are about the Great Depression) I think this chart gives us a good sense of the seasonality of depression. Two points that I notice from the chart: 1) depression peaks during the holidays (Thanksgiving to Christmas) and in the spring and 2) year-over-year it appears that depression searches are decreasing.

Tweet Posted by Bill Tancer at 12:41 PM | (0)