Reacknowledgment: April is the Cruelest Month

I posted something like this last year, but it bears repeating.

Contrary to popular belief, suicide rates do not peak at Christmas time. Here in Western New York, as elsewhere, they peak in April. So does all kinds of psychiatric hospitalization, depression and relapses of addiction.

Why is this so, when hopes of Spring abound? Maybe the contrast between the inner weather and the outer weather is too great to bear.

As usual, poets express  it better than anyone. Here’s Robert Frost:

Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.