Vacation, Collective Restoration, and Mental Health in a Population

Abstract

Vacations enable people to help one another, spend time together in pleasant contexts, and renew relational resources. Reasoning that these shared activities spread social and psychological benefits through social networks, we hypothesized that increase in the number of vacationing workers engenders nonlinear decline in psychological distress at the population level. We applied time-series methods to aggregate data on monthly dispensation of antidepressants to the Swedish population for the 147 months starting January 1993. We obtained the data from the pharmacy corporation allied with the national health care system and from governmental sources. Dispensation of antidepressants declined logarithmically with increase in the number of vacationing workers, for men and women alike. The associations held among people beyond retirement age as well as people of working age, further evidence that vacation benefits spread beyond vacationing workers. The results bear on the social regulation of time for restoration as a general determinant of population health.