Why Blue Monday resonates despite the pseudoscience

The seasons of life actually need some meteorological awareness.

Rachael Newham

Rachael is an author and theology of mental health specialist.

A wrapped-up man sits and leans against a bare tree, as dark clouds give way to sun.

Isaak Alexandre Karslian on Unsplash.

Christmas cheer has long gone, the weather is grey and wet, bills are high and we’ve most likely already broken our New Year’s resolutions - January seems to have a lot to answer for!

So much so that the third Monday in January has actually been called “Blue Monday” - the most depressing day of the year.

It was developed using a mathematical equation taking into account all the elements of January misery - and the cure? Booking a sunny holiday.

It sounds like it makes sense, doesn't it? Don’t we all feel a slump in the dark cold days in the middle of January?

The problem is, ‘Blue Monday’ is based on some rather shaky pseudoscience concocted purely for a travel company to sell their summer holidays. In the equation, the units are undefined, and the formula can’t be verified making it effectively useless.

Despite this, the idea of Blue Monday has captured our imaginations and our attention - meaning that even though it is nothing more than a marketing campaign written way back in 2005 - the idea has stuck around because it makes sense.

And we like to make sense of our feelings, don’t we? If we can pinpoint a specific reason for why we feel low or unmotivated, we feel less alone. Perhaps that’s why the idea of Blue Monday has persisted for twenty years.

For some, the seasons can have a tangible effect on mental health, up to three percent of people live with ‘significant winter depression’ and gimmicks like Blue Monday risk trivialising the debilitation of Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Even for those of us who do not live with seasonal mental illnesses, we have different needs according to the seasons. Our energy ebbs and flows throughout the year - it’s natural to want to live at a slower pace during the dark winter months -many people find themselves sleeping and eating more when we have shorter days and longer nights.

Emotionally we will also have seasons where we experience life as vibrantly as spring and others when we want to retreat and feel the need to grieve our losses as the seeds hide beneath the ground away from the cold, waiting to bloom.

Author Katherine May writes about this in her book Wintering: “Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through.”

It’s something that both the Bible and the church year recognise, that we have to adapt to the seasons of life we’re living in. The writer of Ecclesiastes, sometimes thought to be King Saul, writes that “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens” and he goes on to include living and dying, planting and uprooting, killing and healing.

We can be encouraged that there is no specific day that is more or less depressing than any of the others, but also recognise the changing seasons that our emotions go through in the same way as the natural world does.

What matters is that we, lean into the season of life we’re in and not deny it. The church year allows us to do so through liturgy, as we cycle through Advent, Christmas. Lent, Easter and Ordinary time. There are opportunities to grieve our losses, celebrate our joys, learn lessons and practice what it means to be in community through every emotion. By going through these seasons and leaning into the meteorological seasons we give ourselves a chance to stretch our emotional muscles in mourning, rejoicing and simply working out how to navigate everyday life!

Paul, who pastored and wrote to many churches in their early days, told one church in Rome to “Laugh with your happy friends when they’re happy; share tears when they’re down,” and this I think is simple advice for us as we travel through the seasons of our lives and the year. All emotions - however uncomfortable they might be - need attention.

Blue Monday may be a marketing myth but recognising that we need to make space for all our feelings - the happy and the sad - can be just the reminder we need.

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Article

Assisted dying

Death & life

9 November 2023

4 min read

The cold truth of Canadian lives not worth living

Canada’s implementation of medical assistance shows that a society considers some lives not worth living.

M. Ciftci

Mehmet Ciftci has a PhD in political theology from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on bioethics, faith and politics.

A IV drip bag hangs from a medical stand.

Marcelo Leal on Unsplash.

Alan Nichols’ application for euthanasia mentions only one health condition as the reason for his request: hearing loss. “Alan was basically put to death,” according to his brother. He was hospitalized after being found dehydrated and malnourished in his house. He asked his brother to “bust him out” of the hospital as soon as possible. A month after being admitting, he was euthanized through MAID (medical assistance in dying), despite the desperate objections of his family and his primary health practitioner. They were informed of the procedure over the phone only four days before it took place. They have since reported Alan’s case to the police; they argue he was not in a fit state of mind to understand the procedure or make decisions for himself. He had no life-threatening conditions. He was vulnerable.

Canada’s relaxed laws around MAID came to international attention when CTV News reported that a fifty-one-year-old woman chose MAID after failing for two years to find housing that would allow her to manage her multiple chemical sensitivities. Despite the best efforts of friends and even her doctors to get her suitable housing in Toronto, letters left behind documented her desperate yet fruitless search for help. She begged officials at all layers of government to help find an apartment free from the chemicals and cigarette and marijuana smoke that worsened her symptoms. “The government sees me as expendable trash, a complainer, useless and a pain in the a**,” she said in a video days before her death.

These are only some of the terrible stories that have been reported after Canada became the first Commonwealth country to legalise assisted suicide and euthanasia. Advocates of MAID will point to how comfortable Canadians are with it. As a recent poll revealed, MAID is supported by 73 per cent of Canadians, with 27 per cent supporting MAID even if the only affliction is poverty, 28 per cent for homelessness, and 20 per cent for any reason whatsoever. Those numbers may shift as disability activists and medical professionals continue to raise the alarm over the consequences of growing numbers choosing MAID, from 2,838 deaths in 2017 to 10,064 in 2021.

MAID was introduced in 2016... Only those suffering from incurable diseases whose death was “reasonably foreseeable” were eligible, initially.

There are two reasons why the Canadian example teaches us to remain firmly opposed to the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia in the UK.

The first is that the slippery slope in this case is real. Campaigners for Dignity in Dying claim they want only the legalisation of assisted suicide, not of euthanasia. The latter involves a doctor directly administering lethal drugs, without requiring the patient’s participation. (MAID permits both, although euthanasia is the method used in 99 per cent of cases.) They argue there is no evidence that legalising assisted suicide in the UK would lead to a loosening of laws over time. But this is contradicted by the timeline of events in Canada.

MAID was introduced in 2016 following the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling in 2015 that the criminalisation of assisted suicide violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Only those suffering from incurable diseases whose death was “reasonably foreseeable” were eligible, initially. But the MAID evangelists did not wait long before complaining that this was too restrictive. The courts obliged, and in 2019 the court of Quebec found the “reasonably foreseeable” condition to contravene the Charter. In 2021 the laws were changed to allow MAID for those whose natural death was not foreseeable, but who have a condition considered intolerable by the applicant. Those suffering only from mental illnesses will be eligible for MAID in March 2024.

The slope becomes more slippery still: the government is considering further expansion to allow “mature minors”, vaguely defined as children mature enough to make their own treatment decisions, to ask to be killed, even against a parent’s wishes.

A society that kills those who ask to be killed has already made a choice to consider some lives not worth living,

The second lesson is about what kind of society we want to be. For a doctor to present the option of being killed, which Canadian doctors are now obliged to do whenever “medically relevant”, even if the patient does not bring it up first, does not expand patients’ freedom. It is rather an invitation to despair. This is frequently forgotten when some think that denying patients the choice to seek death is “imposing Christian values” as one cleric of the Anglican Church of Canada said. Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and others have opposed MAID because a society that kills those who ask to be killed has already made a choice to consider some lives not worth living, and to invite those already made vulnerable by their pain and distress to see themselves as a burden to others. Not to mention the perverse incentives created to reduce medical and palliative care.

We can and should support those who are frail and in need of care at the end of their lives to die with dignity, without hastening their deaths, without deeming their lives no longer worth living. Dame Cicely Saunders and other pioneers of the hospice movement have shown us what an alternative to assisted suicide and euthanasia would look like. Hospices put into practice the parable of the Good Samaritan, who responded with pity to the man beaten by robbers, bandaging his wounds and giving him a place to rest and receive care. Jesus tells the parable to show what it means to be a good neighbour to someone and how to react with compassion to suffering. What would have been the message of the parable if the Samaritan had instead reacted to the sight of the suffering man by reaching for his dagger?