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[Epistemic status: low. You tell me if you think this works.]

Commenter no_bear_so_low has been doing some great work with Google Trends recently \\u2013 see for example his\\xa0Internet searches increasingly favour the left over the right wing of politics\\xa0or\\xa0Googling habits suggest we are getting a lot more anxious.

I wanted to try some similar things, and in the process I learned that this is hard. Existing sites on\\xa0how to use Google Trends for research\\xa0don\\u2019t capture some of the things I learned, so I wanted to go over it here.

Suppose I want to measure the level of interest in \\u201cpsychiatry\\u201d over the past few years:

Looks like interest is going down. But what if I search for \\u201cpsychiatrist\\u201d instead?

\\xa0Uh oh, now it looks like interest is going up. I guess what I\\u2019m really interested in is mental health more generally, what if I put in \\u201csuicide\\u201d?

\\xa0

Now everything else is invisible, and the data are dominated by a spike in August 2016, which as far as I can tell is related to the release of the movie \\u201cSuicide Squad\\u201d.

I could try other terms, like \\u201cdepression\\u201d and \\u201canxiety\\u201d, but no_bear\\u2019s data already tells us those two are moving in opposite directions. Also, depression has a spike in late 2008, which must be related to the stock market crash and people\\u2019s expectations of an economic depression. This doesn\\u2019t seem like a great way to figure out anything.

I wondered if averaging a bunch of things might take away some of the noise. I chose nine terms that seemed related to psychiatry in some way: psychiatry, psychiatrist, psychotherapy, mental illness, mental health, suicide, depression, antidepressants, and anxiety. Google won\\u2019t let you combine that many terms in a single query, but that\\u2019s okay \\u2013 I don\\u2019t want to see them relative to one another, I just want to get standardized data on each. There\\u2019s a button to download any individual Google Trends query as a spreadsheet: