319- Blue Monday

Today's "blue monday", claimed, as you can read on wiki, to be the most depressing day of the year. You can also see that this is pseudoscience, despite a mathematical formula used to find this day - 15th of January as the most depression and the happiest in the second half of June.


Let me also send you to the Pseudoscience entry. In short, pseudoscience appears scientific in nature, creating statements, beliefs and practices that people will follow blindly if a charismatic person sells the idea behind them, but which are contradictory, exaggerated and most importantly, unscientifically claimed. It's very important to untangle claims and find if they are scientific or not, and I shall discuss this elsewhere.

Today, however, I will concentrate on "blue monday".

First of all, the association of blue to depression is based on a cultural association routed down to our language expressions of feeling blue to describe feeling sad. 
There was also a scientific research on Psychological science magazine, which was retracted, but people still associate blue with sadness, and by proxy, to depression. 

Second, sadness is an emotion. Sadness can be felt during depression, a mental illness, but isn't the sole representation of it.

Thirdly, blue monday is a pseudoscientifically and culturally based day, over-simplifying and confusing people with terms sadness and depression as if they were synonymes, when in reality, sadness is an emotion that anyone can feel and experience in life, and is only one of the emotions that can be felt in depression. 

Depression is a mental illness. 

Personally, blue is my favorite color, my first one, which I favored for over half of my life. Blue skies, clear of clouds are happy for me. 

When I feel the kind of sadness that comes with depression, I feel gloomy, un-appreciated, desperate and hopeless. Most would associate the color black to this, just like the french expression "broyer du noir" (to grind black), but black and blue and any other color doesn't actually have any emotion, and each culture associates different colors to emotions and events, which tells us what ? That these are transient and shall change ; and thus, that these associations are human-made and false, bringing back to the topic of pseudoscience.

The third point I want to make is that mental illness - any, not just depression - cannot be associated to only one day in the year, no matter how you set it up, even for awareness days, weeks and months. We have to raise awareness on a daily basis, whenever we are capable. 
Mental illnesses don't choose a day in the year to strike. 

We can suffer from it daily, and even if some days we struggle less, our mental illness doesn't tend to just vanish and never takes coffee breaks, bank holidays or other cultural breaks. It's here and tends to stay. That is the case for depression too. 

The only ways for us to get better are to work hard, through therapy ; many of us take medication and all of us need :

support, and to end stigmas, including the ones created by cultural misunderstanding of color associations, and pseudoscientifically calculated days such as today. 

So, before you read into bluemonday, educate yourself. Read the articles I shared above. Read about mental health issues as there are a myriad of mental illnesses. None of them are simple to experience. None of them has a specific day.