Aalice.320 net.suicide utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!mhtsa!alice!xchar Wed Dec 30 23:20:05 1981 Holiday blues [The following item was submitted before I saw Peter Langston's one containing similar information, but I suspect that it never got out onto the net. It can now serve as corroboration of the accuracy of Peter's note-taking and correction of the psychologist's name.] Posted: Sat Dec 26 00:40:16 1981 >From "The Holiday Blues--A Christmas Fable?" by Rochelle Semmel Albin, in PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, Dec. 1981: "Data collected by the National Center for Health Statistics between 1950 and 1978 show that there are usually more suicides in April than in any other month. The fewest occur in December....[Most studies] show that more people are admitted to mental hospitals during the summer than at any other time....I gave nearly 200 college students a variety of psychological tests at dif- ferent times....One of the tests, a measure of depression..., showed that students felt their lowest just before final examinations in December and May. But since they were equally depressed at both times, exams seemed to be the cause, not Christmas...." The author, a clinical fellow in psychology at Harvard Medical School, goes on to give evi- dence that suggests that there may be "some other factor, re- lated specifically to the holiday season," that contributes to the December depression. Why do psychotherapists remain convinced of the reality of Christmas blues? Perhaps "...the contrast between the patients' troubles and the determined joyousness of the season...[is] so depressing [to the therapists] that, in quintessential Freudian fashion, they project their suffering on the rest of the world." --Charlie Harris (alice!xchar), Bell Labs, Murray Hill ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.