During the past two years, there have been four times that depression, stress, and drugs has witnessed a major decline. The lowest point, with depression at 62, stress at 36, and drugs at 59, occurred in December 24th to the 30th of 2017. In 2016, a similar but slightly less dip appeared in the data set. The drastic popularity decline of these topics is most likely a result of a holiday, Christmas. Christmas is a religious holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ. However, not just religious people celebrate this holiday. It has become very popular including the exchanging and buying of gifts, decorating of a christmas tree, and the gathering of families. As it promotes positive feelings of caring and happiness, the likeliness of the low rates of depression, drugs, and stress being connected to Christmas is very high. We also see slightly smaller declines in the data in late November of 2016 and 2017. Similarly, this could also be occurring due to another holiday, Thanksgiving. The data set also reveals a mostly steady level of popularity of the three queries between January 29 to April 29 of 2017. This could be related to school as it is a constant in people’s lives during this time. Because of it being so integrated in our daily life, that most likely explains why we don’t see much change or major spikes in the data. Continuing from April 29 to July 8 of 2017, the data shows a slow decline. As school winds down and summer comes closer, people’s stress and depression levels drop, which suggests that school is a major stressor and plays a significant role in the rates of student stress, depression, and drug usage.
Through the analyzation of google trend correlations between drugs, depression, and stress, I have learned that the interconnections between all three run much deeper than we might think. The data confirms the impact school has on people on a large scale and could be a possible explanation to why these have become such prominant issues worldwide. Additionally, the decline of drugs, depression, and stress are most likely an effect of the time period. Because these dips happen during the holiday season, we can conclude that there is a high probability that the good energy and positive aspects of holidays are directly related to the decrease in popularity of drugs and negative feelings of anxiety and depression.