Plan. No gauge has been measured yet; there is no version to cite.
Indicators
What we will measure — and the number we refuse
These are indicators we plan to build, each with a method and a stated limit. There will be no ranking of countries by how ill people are, and no ranking by fear of death. Google Flu Trends is listed here as a warning: a number built from searches that overshot.
This year’s theme has its own page: Theme of the year
- Will not ship
World psychological temperature
We will not publish this
A single ranking of countries by ‘how sick the minds are’ would repeat the mistake of Google Flu Trends, which predicted flu from search queries and overshot badly. Search volume and online mood change day to day; they do not count people.
We leave this slot empty on purpose. Anyone can publish a mood score. We refuse the one that would make us famous for a year and wrong forever.
- Briefing
Loneliness as air quality
Public number, not a flaw
The first indicator we are building. We are assembling a country table from surveys — not from hashtags — with a method; nothing has been measured yet, and it gets a version number only once it is.
Not a mandate that introversion is a disease, or that everyone should join a club.
- On the desk
The page at 1 a.m.
Help panel or a thread
Country × crisis query × what the engine puts on the page: help, forum, method, ads. That is a map a search company can change. It is not ‘this nation got sadder’.
We do not publish methods that make harm easier to find. We do not treat a trend line as incidence.
- Briefing
The loud-day headline
Widens or narrows a cluster
After a high-profile death the press is a public-health instrument. The gauge is whether the sentence carried a help link and refused the method — not how many times we were tagged.
Journalism does not cause suicide one-to-one. Silence is not the only alternative to spectacle.