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
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