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James Randolph Hillard, MD; John Buckman, MD

JAMA. 1982;248(23):3175-3176.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

IS CHRISTMAS hazardous to your mental health? A widespread popular belief says that it is. In fact, a notable proportion of what the general public reads about depressive illness concerns depression at Christmas. The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, a standard index of 170 widely circulated popular publications, lists 147 articles on "depression, mental" during the last ten years and 21 deal with the "Christmas depression syndrome." The articles have titles like "Christmas Depression and How to Deal With It," "Beat Those Holiday Blues," and "Holidays Got You Down?" They usually include some "case reports," some comments by a psychiatrist, and some helpful hints on how to avoid depression. Newspapers, radio, and television repeat the same general pattern. But what does the medical literature tell us about this much publicized syndrome?

Professional Literature

The relevant professional literature, almost all of it from the United States, contains articles of two types: . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry, University of Virginia Medical Center, Charlottesville.

Footnotes
Reprint requests to Box 378, University of Virginia Medical Center, Charlottesville, VA 22908 (Dr Hillard).

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