In his classic examination of the 1929 Wall Street crash John Galbraith disabuses us of a widely held notion:

In the week or so following Black Thursday, the London penny press told delightedly of the scenes in downtown New York. Speculators were hurling themselves from windows; pedestrians picked their ways delicately between the bodies of fallen financiers.

In the United States the suicide wave that followed the stock market crash is part of the legend of 1929. In fact there was none. For several years before 1929 the suicide rate had been gradually rising. It continued to increase in that year, with a further and much sharper increase in 1930, 1931 and 1932 – years when there were many things besides the stock market to cause people to conclude that life was no longer worth living (chapter 8).

Galbraith goes on to say that in the two months following the crash the number of suicides in New York were actually comparatively low. There were in fact only two suicides on Wall Street, but these were undoubtedly dramatic. On Nov. 5, Hulda Borowski, a clerk who had been working at a Wall Street stock brokerage house for 28 years, leapt off a 40-story building; on November 16, three days after the market had taken another dive, G.E. Cutler, the head of a produce firm, climbed onto the ledge of his lawyer’s office and similarly plunged to this death.

Thankfully you can’t open the windows on tall buildings these days.

On the day Lehman Brothers was wound up I took a bus through the city and looked up once or twice from my book to see if there was anyone standing on any ledges. To my relief there was no one to be seen. Although vast sums of money have been lost, the crisis we are currently experiencing is nothing like as severe as the 1929 crash. Furthermore, thinking more broadly, predicting suicide is difficult; especially at the primary care level as depressive symptoms are common, but suicide rare. In 1998 Jenkins contended that in the UK every week 10% of 16-65 year olds report suicide depressive symptoms and 1% admits suicidal ideation, but set against this, only 0.01% will kill themselves. Previous attempts and self harm are risk factors for subsequent successful attempts; around a quarter of suicides are preceded by non-fatal self harm in the previous year (Owens and House 1994) and suicide incidence in those who have committed recent non fatal self harm is 1 in 100 over the next year, rising to 1 in 15 during 9 or more years.

The BBC has an interview with the grandson of a man who killed himself during the crash

There is one report of a banker taking his life.

Wall Street Suicides Slate

Time Magazine 80 days that changed the world - 1929

Someone called Cliff Arnall has come up with a equation for the most depressing day of the year.  It goes like this:

1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA.

Where W is weather, D is debt - minus the money (d) due on January’s pay day - and T is the time since Christmas.
Q is the period since the failure to quit a bad habit, M stands for general motivational levels and NA is the need to take action and do something about it.

I was rather amused by this the first time I read about it.  The Guardian had an article all about the best songs to listen to on the most miserable day of the year.  But it’s all bollocks, so much so that it is worthy of a diatribe from Bad Scientist writer Ben Goldacre, who appears to be a longtime adversary of Mr Arnall.  The same story was wheeled out in 2005 and 2006
The Samitarians got sucked this time and have launched Beat Blue Monday as a money earning drive, allegedly with Mr Arnall and a PR company taking their cut.

So when is the most depressing day of the year? If we assume that people who commit suicide are a reliable indicator of misery, then these two papers are relevant:

The Office of National Statistics have published a cheerful paper entitled Mortality from suicide and drug-related poisoning by day of the week in England and Wales, 1993–2002 An increased proportion of suicides occurred on Mondays, while the single day on which the largest number of suicides occurred was 1st January 2000, a Saturday.  The increased numbers of deaths would on a Monday and especially on 1st January would suggest a theory that people are more suicidal with the move into a new time period.

More light is shed by another interesting article which considers the frequency of suicide by day, day of the week, month, and lunar phase by studying suicide occurrence among residents of Sacramento County, CA, during the period from 1925 to 1983. It found suicide occurrence varying substantially by time of day, with the fewest suicide deaths occurred during the early morning hours. Suicides occurred most frequently on Monday for both males and females and for most age groups. Furthermore, variation by month followed no consistent pattern by gender, age, years of the study. Suicide occurrence did not vary by lunar phase.

There aren’t so many werewolves after all.