Seasonal variation in antidepressant prescriptions, environmental light and web queries for seasonal affective disorder

Summary The state of an individual's mental health depends on many factors. Determination of the importance of any particular factor within a population needs access to unbiased data. We used publicly available data-sets to investigate, at a population level, how surrogates of mental health covary with light exposure. We found strong seasonal patterns of antidepressant prescriptions, which show stronger correlations with day length than levels...