Is Blue Monday bad for our mental health?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 January 2020

⏱️ 18 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Blue Monday is supposedly the saddest day of the year. 15 years ago that idea was debunked, yet every year in the UK #bluemonday trends on Twitter and the internet is flooded with deals for holidays, ‘wellness’ deals and products offering to boost our mood. In this episode we look at the discomfort around brands adopting mental health awareness as part of their marketing strategy with psychiatry researcher Melisa Kose. We unpack the mythical origins of the Blue Monday with the BBC’s head of statistics, Robert Cuffe. We also speak to Carmen Papaluca, from University of Notre Dame in Australia, who has studied how the aspirational aspects of Instagram damage the mental wellbeing of young women she teaches. Presenter: Tina Daheley Producers: Lucy Hancock and Duncan Barber Mixed by Emma Crowe Editor: Philly Beaumont

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:04.6	Hello.
0:06.6	I'm Tina Dehealey.
0:08.6	Welcome to Beyond Today, where we ask one big question about one big story.
0:13.2	Today is Blue Monday bad for our mental health.
0:25.0	Today is Blue Monday, apparently the most depressing day of the year.
0:38.0	And if you look at the blue Monday hashtag, it's an odd combination of things like
0:42.1	adverts for cheap sushi deals, charities offering support,
0:46.2	and people sharing their darkest struggles with depression.
0:50.3	Opening up about mental health is obviously a good thing, but how helpful is it to suggest that we can buy our way out of our problems by say booking a holiday or online shopping?
1:01.0	Well, someone who's noticed a trend with brands and the way they speak out about mental health is
1:06.1	Melissa Coe's a researcher at King's College London.
1:10.6	Melissa's written about the commercialization of mental health and the way it's discussed in popular culture.
1:17.0	One day, when she was at home, she spotted a tweet from Orange Juice Brands Sunny D's official account.
1:25.0	The tweet came out of nowhere and simply read,
1:30.0	I can't do this anymore.
1:32.0	I quickly noticed that a lot of the responses were from people playing along with the joke and just being like oh bro. You know we got you don't worry. I'm sorry Sun Idi you're feeling this way.
1:43.0	But then what stood out was the fact that other brands were kind of jumping on this bandwagon
1:48.0	and playing along with this weird role play of pretending to be an individual so you had moon pie it's like oh what's going on
1:55.1	sunny as if again it's just they're just talking to a single person then we have pop-tarts
2:00.5	jump in with hey sunny can I please offer you a hug we're going to get
2:03.7	through this together my friend to where sunny the replies yeah I'll take some of that
	...

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