It's depressing...

The third Monday in January has become known as Blue Monday; the weather is cold and damp and the days are short, you wake to the arrival of a bloated credit card bill and the growing realisation that all your New Year's resolutions have failed. Science proves it to be the most depressing date in the calendar.

But does it and is it?

In reality Blue Monday started as a press campaign by Sky Travel in an effort to get people to shake their (so called) winter blues by booking a holiday. The article was largely pre-written before being circulated to the scientific community for endorsement. Cash was offered as a sweetener, should the thrill of seeing your name in print as the author of this claim not be enough.

Cardiff University's Dr Cliff Arnall, a psychologist, stepped up to the mark and into the limelight, and with a scientific equation to prove it.

Following the initial thrill of New Year's celebrations and changing over a new leaf, reality starts to sink in. The realization coincides with the dark clouds rolling in and the obligation to pay off Christmas credit card bills.

Cardiff University were quick to distance themselves from Dr Cliff and his psuedoscience. Dr Cliff has since gone on to write an equation to calculate the happiest day of the year (sponsored by Walls Icecream).

That was in 2005 and since then the press have run this story every year, despite some public campaigns (notably by Dr Ben Goldacre in his Bad Science column) to discredit this as meaningless babble. Google it today and you'll see from the results it's still a story that the media are prepared to flog to death. Surprisingly, it has also been used by organisations concerned with mental health to bring a focus to depression.

What's really depressing about all this is that depression is a real and very serious condition. It is not a slight feeling of vague sadness to be hijacked by the media and paraded through the press like a bank holiday; something to mark in your calendar for next year.