Are you aware of the significance of Monday 18th January 2016? If not, allow me to enlighten you. It is, this year, the third Monday of the month, “the most depressing day of the year.” Oh, is that so?
The most depressing day of the year is an age old tradition, going all the way back, some say, to 2005. It did not come about through scientific research; in fact it was invented by a travel company as a means by which they could flog holidays when people are hacked off with winter. Some say there are links to post Christmas blues, post Christmas debt and the long dark days we experience at this time of year. I don’t buy any of this. It’s nonsense and it’s dangerous nonsense. Let me explain why.
There is a myth about depression, that it’s about being a bit down. It’s nothing that couldn’t be sorted out by pulling yourself together, sorting yourself out and getting on with life, just like everyone else. Now, anyone who lives with depression knows that just isn’t true. But bullshit stories like Blue Monday do more than anything to perpetuate the myths.
Blue Monday, apart from being a great record by New Order, doesn’t exist; I am confident of that. Why not blue any day? It’s only Blue Monday if you hate your job and you don’t want to get up on a Monday morning. I used to feel like that every single week of the year in the latter days of my civil service existence, but I was just almightily pissed off, fed up; not mentally ill. (Well, I was the latter too, but it had nothing to do with work, or not much anyway.) You won’t need Prozac or Citalopram for being a bit fed up. It’s not the same thing as being ill.
If you read the Sun, first of all I feel very sorry for you, then you will have read that Blue Monday is literally depressing. Indeed, they offer a series of hints to deal with the ‘depression’, which it patently isn’t. This includes having sex. My therapist hasn’t mentioned that one yet, but there’s always time. In fact, the Sun’s report and subsequent advice more than borders on sheer idiocy, sheer dangerous idiocy at that. They make it crystal clear that being a bit down is exactly the same thing as clinical depression. If only I had known before. Think how much I could have saved the NHS in terms of wasted therapies and anti-depressants.
Worse still, the Sun publishes poll findings that reveal 61% of people will feel depressed on their way to work today. That’s getting on for two thirds of the entire population. This depression malarkey must be even worse than I thought it was. But unless there has been a catastrophic underestimation of the levels of mental illness in the country, they are not, each and every one of them, clinically depressed.
The myth of Blue Monday and the brainless journalism of the Sun conspires to belittle a real and debilitating illness; in the name of commercialism and in the name of entertainment, as the Sun’s editor would probably put it.
The long dark days probably don’t help my depression but, along with the financial hangover from Christmas, they don’t greatly affect it because – and here comes the rub – depression is an illness. It’s an illness. Being fed up is being fed up. You don’t want to curl up and die when you are fed up. You just feel, well, fed up when you are fed up. If you don’t believe me, I don’t recommend that you try it.
No, the third Monday of the year is not some mystical day when we all of us develop clinical depression. It’s the third Monday in what is, in my opinion, the worst season of the year.
And if the Sun thinks Blue Monday is real, you must surely know it isn’t?
