Spring has sprung, which means it’s time to store away your cosy jumpers and warming tins of soup, and bring out the flip flops and the summery cocktails. But it’s not just the Pimms that gives you that happy-go-lucky feeling of wellness during springtime; it’s the season itself. This is according to Google and a team of researchers from the University of Southern California, Harvard and Johns Hopkins, who have discovered that mental health conditions, such as obsessive compulsive disorder, depression and anorexia, are far more seasonal than you think.
John Ayers led a group of epidemiologists, who combed through every Google search performed in the United States and Australia between 2006 and 2010. The researchers looked for queries like “symptoms of” and “medications for” OCD, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar, depression, anorexia, bulimia and schizophrenia. The authors noted in a forthcoming study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (PDF), that the internet is ‘the world’s most relied-on health resource. Because of mental health’s complexity, stigma, and obstacles to care, patients are likely to investigate their problems online.’
For epidemiologists, it is often difficult to track a population’s long-term mental wellbeing indicators. Phone surveys are costly, and often provide unreliable results as people don’t tend to open up on the phone to a complete stranger, especially when it concerns the voices in their head. Therefore, Google queries offer a new and more effective alternative; nakedly honest health queries which are free to collect. Ayers explained, ‘This is “Moneyball” for mental health. Big data and hypotheses-free investigations will allow for an unprecedented growth of knowledge across disciplines, especially mental health.’
During the study, the researchers found that mental illness has a seasonal component, with monthly dips and peaks. American mental illness queries increased by 14% in January, while Australia’s 11% rise came six months later, during the Australian winter. Ayers noted, ‘We were very surprised to find that this seasonal pattern was replicated across a number of disease categories. For example, we saw strong seasonal patterns for schizophrenia, a disease for which symptom severity had not been associated with seasonal patterns, no doubt in part due to the challenges of performing field surveys of individuals with psychotic symptoms.’
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