You ever have one of those moments where you realize something you’ve believed for years was completely false? That is something that happened to me last week.
The Planet Money newsletter this week was a round-up of great stories about the holidays. Topics covered included whether stock prices predictably increase during the holidays, why gas prices don’t increase with airline ticket prices during the holidays, and a classic paper by famous scrooge Joel Waldfogel arguing the inefficiency of gift giving.
But it wasn’t any of these that left me shocked. It was instead a two-paragraph story they had about how suicides don’t increase during the holidays.
Am I the only one who didn’t know this? Just last weekend, I was watching the 1984 comedy-horror classic Gremlins with my fiancée and one of the main characters was saying that suicide rates go up during the holidays. Neither of us batted an eye: it seemed to be an incontrovertible fact.
If you clicked the link above, you may be disappointed. The article defending the controversial claim is available for a cool $64 from BMJ journals. But have no fear! The NIH has made the scant review available for free. In this two page review of fifteen studies, six conducted between the mid 80s and early 2000s that were deemed high-quality, a consultant and a physician conclude “suicide and parasuicide rates go down around Christmas (emphasis added).”
Is this true? In recent data, this also seems to be the case. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes fatal injury data available through its Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System. Using this data, you can see that suicide incidence per month is lower in December from 2021 to 2024 than every other month save one: February. Once you account for the fact that February has three fewer days than December, December is far lower than any other month, with average daily suicides anywhere from 4% (November) to 14% (August) higher in any other given month. Overall, the daily suicide rate is 7% lower in December than it is for the year as a whole. So from 2021 to 2024, suicide rates plunged to their lowest rates of the year in December. This trend has been so consistent over the past four years that December was the lowest daily suicide rate in 2022, 2023, and 2024. In 2021, January’s suicide rate was 0.2% lower than December and April’s was 1.3% lower.
So yes, suicide rates do go down in December.
So why does the myth persist?
One explanation is media. The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication has been tracking media coverage of the “suicides increase during the holidays” myth for decades and finds dozens of stories nationwide every year perpetuating the myth. Last year was the lowest year in nearly two decades with 19 news reports reporting the myth. A typical year over the course of the study has over 50 news reports claiming suicides spike during the holidays.
I wonder if there is a connection here with the cultural exaggeration of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Despite widespread attention among the general population, studies of the disorder say that, at the high end, population prevalence is only 10% and is likely closer to 1-2%. A retrospective meta-analysis pegged the lifetime incidence of Seasonal Affective Disorder in the single-digits.
The mistaken association people have between the weather and well-being is well-documented. In a landmark study, Nobel-prize winning behavioral economist Dan Kahneman surveyed students at Ohio State University and the University of California, Los Angeles on perceptions of happiness. Both students in Ohio and southern California believed climate and weather was a strong predictor of happiness and both students in Ohio and southern California agreed that weather and climate was better in southern California than it is in Ohio. Despite this, students in California did not report being happier than students in Ohio.
Kahneman calls this mistake a “focusing illusion.” In Kahneman’s words, “nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” You see this all the time: students stressed out of their minds about an exam that they will not even remember in a few months, people excited about the prospects for a promotion to a job that will feel normal in a year. Weather is a particularly potent example of this.
No doubt the experience of walking across an academic quad or waiting at a bus stop is different on a 20-degree January morning in Ohio than it is on a 70-degree any-time-of-the-year day in Los Angeles. But what the best evidence shows is that this experience is fleeting. Eventually you get to class or on the bus, to work or home, and then things like whether you have close friends or a spouse, you are involved in your community, and you have a stable job and income impact happiness.
Maybe this is the missing piece of the puzzle around the “suicides go up during the holidays” myth. If well-being is more highly correlated with relationships, involvement, employment, and security than it is with weather, then we should not be surprised that suicides go down during the holidays. The holidays are a time when people spend time with family. If anything, people without connections are not more lonely as the pop culture parable goes. They are just as lonely as ever, while people who are living on the edge, who may usually feel lonely, find connection with others that they do not usually have.
So what can we do to reduce suicide risk in the face of this knowledge? The Annenberg School has collaborated with media organizations to develop a set of guidelines for reporting on suicide that reduce contagion. People should also be aware of 988, a crisis line that someone struggling with suicidal thoughts can dial to connect with someone. In addition to these tools, timing awareness campaigns around months that actually see higher suicide rates like in the summer can be more effective than focusing on the mythological winter rates.
You learn something new every day. Hopefully learning new things can help us make better decisions that will ultimately improve lives.