While the media has grossly overshot the mark, claiming a non-existent increase in suicide rates over the holidays, there is one logical explanation, the kernal of truth if you will.
Mental Health
Seasonal Affective Disorder
What is Seasonal Affective Disorder?
Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, is mood disorder characterized by mental depression related to a certain season of the year - especially winter. Onset usually occurs during adulthood, and it is four times more likely to happen to women than men. Approximately 11 million people are diagnosed with this disorder, which has been incorrectly referred to as "winter blues."
SAD is a clinical diagnosis accepted in the medical community. Dr. Norman E. Rosenthal, Chief of Environmental Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health is the researcher credited with discovering SAD.
What are the symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder?
- daytime drowsiness
- fatigue, or low energy level
- decreased sex drive
- diminished concentration
- difficulty thinking clearly
- tendency to overeat sweets and carbohydrates causing weight gain
Decreased sunlight is thought to be part of the cause of SAD, and is under clinical investigation. One treatment for SAD, which seems to improve the symptoms, is exposure to bright light, especially in the morning.
I just like that seasonal effective disorder is abbreviated "S.A.D." Like "Funtionaly Unqualified to Care Knowlegably for Extended Duration", often used to describe HMO's.
A higher rate of suicide during the holidays is a media myth.
The idea that more people kill themselves around the winter holidays is a myth that the media have
little interest in correcting, according to a study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. In an analysis of newspaper articles about suicide between Thanksgiving and Christmas in 1999, researchers found nearly half of them associated suicide with the winter holidays, despite receiving press releases warning journalists that such associations don’t seem to be warranted. Suicides drop during the winter months, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, and they usually peak during the spring months. Researchers caution that the flurry of articles on holiday suicides could actually inspire “copycat” suicides. Exposure to suicide methods may encourage vulnerable individuals to imitate them, the study warns.
So it's likely the coincidence of Thanksgiving-Yuletide-New Years with the Winter Solstice that causes the Winter Time Holiday Blues. You don't hear about an increase in suicide rates around Easter-July 4th, in other words.
Now, I would like to vent. For those of you who insist on insisting that Jesus is the Reason for the Season, I would like to point out that the early Christian church did not observe the Nativity for any reason, at any time of year. Period. They were Jewish at heart.
25 December marked the Saternalia observance, linked to the birth-death cycle of the pagan god Mythra. This date is also 4 days into the Winter Soltice or Yuletide of the Northern and Norse Europeans by the time Catholicism found its way into Viking lands, the Church had adopted the 25th of December as a Christianized Holy Day and merely absorbed more pagan, or heathen, trappings of Solstice observance as it forced its Helenistic gobbledy gook down the throats of perfectly nature-based "White" people.
So, Jesus is not only not the reason for the season, Santa Clause IS!
Prior to St. Nicholas, or St. Anybody for that matter, the Yuletide tradition held that the Viking god Odin/Wotan would go flying about visting homes and claiming the elderly and ill, for whom winter would only be a cause of suffering. 
He was more Kevorkian than Clause, really.
Merry Mary!
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