Are we better off when we’re singing the blues?

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Next Monday is officially the most depressing day of the year – at least according to a retired psychologist brought in by some marketing guru with a brief to sell foreign holidays.

You can see why it might serve his purposes to come up with a formula that suits his needs – the weather is awful, the holidays are over and there’s nothing on the horizon but hard work and dark nights. So why not go on holidays?

Ignore the fact that part of the ‘formula’ for deciding which day or week of the year is worst includes the fact that you’ve no money and all of those Christmas bills are landing on the welcome mat.

What you actually need is to get even further into debt by flying off to Spain for a week when reality should tell you that you can’t afford the price of the sun tan lotion.

Psychologist Cliff Arnall based his Blue Monday findings on weather conditions, debt, the amount of time since Christmas, the abandoning of New Year’s Resolutions and the fact that we all supposedly hate Mondays anyway.

Of course it should be seen as nothing more than an advertising gimmick on the part of a company called Sky Travel but others have since hijacked it to query if it is indeed earlier in January than originally suggested.

The serious side of this is that it actually trivialises actual depression – because we do a disservice to those who actually struggle with their mental health by saying that we’re depressed over going back to work or getting a spate of bills.

There’s nothing rational about actual depression and it certainly doesn’t fall on the third Monday of any month, let alone the first month of the year.

If anything, this trivialisation makes it harder for those who do suffer from depression to destigmatise this awful illness, even if that was never intended.

But let’s not mix up actual depression with a minor bout of the post-Christmas blues – then there might be something in seeing next week as the worst of the year.

And for all that, there might be something in us that makes us ill at ease with euphoria – even joy – in the first place.

Of course we enjoy good times but equally we quickly grow uncomfortable with it.

It only takes about three days of sun and we’re complaining about the heat; a day of snow and we’re describing it as a national emergency even though the kids are having the time of their lives.

We’re afraid to get too happy in case we jeopardise it – we like to keep under the radar with a level of contentment that’s just comfortably above sad.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.