(Nath Akhil via Unsplash)
T.S. Eliot is literary modernism’s most famous poet. So we can all be forgiven for thinking him merely ironic when he opened his most famous poem by intoning that, “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire… ”
By the time Eliot gets past winter, toward “dull roots,” arriving at his famous “heap of broken images,” and onward to foreign words and phrases, The Waste Land can seem cruel for vexing readers not into pain so much as confusion. And that was in the faraway year of 1922. Today, behavioral scientists would agree that Eliot was on to something far larger than modernist verse. That is because both depression and suicide peak during the spring months, lingering into summer, then fall significantly by fall and winter.
If all this sounds counterintuitive, it is because “seasonal depression” has been perpetually linked to December holidays by lazy broadcast journalists and newspaper advice columnists for decades on end. The insistence that depression and suicide rise alongside family and social gatherings is so stubborn that policy centers and other think tanks have started sounding the alarm years ago to stop this myth’s needless effects of what behavioral scientists call “contagion,” or accidentally conforming to societal expectations. Harmful as this contagion may be, however, it still cannot countermand the fact that calls into suicide-help hotlines such as 988 rise in March to steadily increase in April, May, and June. Only in September do the calls to crisis lines begin to subside.
The root cause at work is our human physiology and its responses to seasonal changes. According to Adam Kaplin, Johns Hopkins assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, inflammation caused by allergies and autoimmune conditions aligns with depression during spring and summer, and with a power that is particularly hard to break.
A cynic would say of course anyone with an autoimmune disease—arthritis, diabetes, Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, et al—would experience depression. However, the seasonal link itself is not in doubt, as Australia, where the summer and winter months are the opposite of what we experience north of the equator, also reports more suicide hot-line calls and suicide deaths themselves during the spring and summer months of November through March. Seasons matter.
The more behavioral scientists collaborate with climate scientists, the more curious the correlation between mental health and biological surroundings becomes. The warmer seasons bring more outdoor activity, bringing on more allergy, sparking more inflammation, but also more exposure to air pollution. There, too, the correlation between mental health and biology can wreck the promise of good, spring and summer vibes.
The lesson in all this is not just to keep your favorite antihistamine at close hand, but to understand also why you might be feeling down when conventional wisdom says you should be feeling up. Spring, after all, is the supposed season of renewal after the darkness of winter. In fact, for millions of people who straddle the cause-and-effect of depression, allergies, and autoimmune disorders, it is the season of spiritual and physical struggle. T.S. Eliot intuited this at a literary level. Decades after The Wasteland blazed its trail, we understand it now as a visceral, biological fact.
