Sunday, January 20, 2008

You're not depressed...

It's too early.
In the digital age we're likely to turn to search engines just as often as we would confide in friends and medical professionals to gauge our psychological state. If we think we're suffering from a real bout of the blues or a mental crisis, we're likely to Google the symptoms or find a chat group in the hopes of performing a self-diagnosis. In fact, online searches for "depression" are among the most popular searches sending traffic to the 5,900 sites that we track in the Hitwise Health and Medical category — but the peak is not in January. According to our Internet behavior, our depression spikes reliably in mid-November every year, right in time for Thanksgiving, the launch of the holiday season. [More]
The results of Internet info-mining are starting to creep me out just slightly.

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