On March 30, World Bipolar Day, Walk in the Park Day, and Earth Hour events are held. Also, March 30 in different years became the day of important discoveries, political decisions and dramatic breakthroughs, which left a noticeable mark in world and Ukrainian history.
World Bipolar Day
The day is dedicated to a mental condition that affects millions of people, but is still rarely talked about openly. The date was chosen because it was on this day that Vincent van Gogh was born, an artist who was posthumously diagnosed with bipolar disorder based on numerous accounts of his unstable psycho-emotional state and deep creative surges, alternating with periods of depression and isolation.
Bipolar disorder is not just “mood swings”, but a chronic mental illness that manifests itself in alternating periods of elation (mania or hypomania) and deep depression. A person can feel all-powerful, hyper-productive, full of ideas – and in a few days or weeks sink into complete apathy, loss of energy and meaning. In severe cases, the condition is accompanied by life risks — both in the mania phase and in the depression phase.
Approximately 1-2% of the world’s population lives with bipolar disorder. This means that there are at least several hundred thousand such people in Ukraine. However, due to stigma, lack of diagnosis and low awareness, most either do not seek help or receive it too late. It is even worse when the symptoms are disguised as “creative character”, “emotionality”, “nervous temperament” or “overwork”.
World Bipolar Day is designed to change that. So that mental health is not talked about as something secondary, but as part of everyday reality. To remove the stigma — and give people a chance for support, diagnosis, and a stable life. And so that those around you also know: this is not a whim, not a weakness, and not an “exaggeration.” This is a diagnosis that you can live with if you start treatment in time.
Interesting facts
People with bipolar disorder have a 20- to 30-fold increased risk of suicide compared to the general population—but with consistent treatment, quality of life can be high.
Many famous personalities had or have bipolar disorder: actors Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stephen Fry, musician Kanye West, writer Virginia Woolf. Their stories show that a diagnosis is not a sentence.
One of the most common myths is that bipolar disorder makes a person “dangerous” to society. In fact, most such people are dangerous except for themselves if left without help.
Treatment of bipolar disorder includes drug therapy, psychotherapy, and lifestyle changes. An individualized support plan can help avoid exacerbations for years.
The term “bipolar” was first used in 1957 by the German psychiatrist Karl Leonhard – before that, the disease was called manic-depressive psychosis. The modern name reflects the bipolar nature of the disorder—without the stigma.
A day of walking in the park
On this day, the world celebrates not the most famous, but surprisingly warm and necessary holiday – the Day of a walk in the park. It does not have an official status or a high-profile origin story, but it definitely makes sense: to remind that even half an hour in the fresh air is not a small thing, but a resource. Especially – in the city, especially – in the spring, especially – at a time when disturbing news fills the space, and schedules compress the day to duties.
A walk in the park is a way to regain the feeling of the body, breathing, rhythm. It does not require preparation, money, a separate item in the to-do list. But it gives more than it seems: it lowers the cortisol level, improves mood, calms the nervous system, and activates attention. It is no coincidence that therapists in many countries have been literally “prescribing” time for patients in green zones for several years — as part of a recovery plan after stress, depression, and overwork.
You don’t have to go far on Walk in the Park Day. It is enough to go to the nearest alley, sit on a bench, walk among the trees without a phone in your hands. It can be alone or with someone. And this is precisely the rare moment when utility completely coincides with simplicity.
Interesting facts
Daily 20-30 minutes in nature reduces the risk of anxiety disorders and depression. This is confirmed by numerous studies in the USA, Japan, and Great Britain.
In many European countries, particularly in Sweden and the Netherlands, urban planners design cities so that a park or square is within walking distance of any house.
In Japan, there is a practice of “forest bathing” (shinrin-yoku), a leisurely walk among the trees, which is officially recognized as part of preventive medicine.
The first public city park in the world was created in 1634 in Boston – Boston Common.
In Kyiv, the largest park is Holosiivskyi, which is part of the national nature park. It has more than 4 thousand hectares of area.
Action “Earth Hour”
Every year on the last Saturday of March, millions of people around the world join the Earth Hour campaign, an international initiative calling for one hour to turn off lights and electrical appliances as a symbol of caring for the environment. In 2025, it will take place on March 30 from 20:30 to 21:30 local time.
“Earth Hour” was born in 2007 in Australia, and now covers more than 190 countries. It’s not about saving energy per se – although that’s important – it’s about consciousness. That climate change, resource depletion, environmental pollution are not something abstract or distant. And that even one hour of symbolic darkness can be a reminder: responsibility for the planet is shared.
Traditionally, not only individual citizens, but also entire cities join the action: they turn off the lighting on buildings, the illumination of monuments, and signs. In Kyiv, in previous years, the Mykhailo Golden Dome Cathedral, Independence Square, and the KMDA building were darkened. In Lviv – the Town Hall and the Opera House. The action takes place every time in the face of new challenges – a pandemic, war, energy attacks – but it does not lose its meaning: to remember that even in the most acute crises around there is another front – an environmental one.
Interesting facts
The idea of ”Earth Hour” originated in the newspaper’s editorial office: the first initiative was supported by The Sydney Morning Herald and advertising agency Leo Burnett to draw attention to the problems of climate change in Australia. It was not initially a global WWF campaign, but a local information project.
In 2009, the action gained a global scale for the first time — 88 countries and more than 4,000 cities officially joined it. And then, for the first time, the lights of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the Coliseum in Rome, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and Times Square in New York were turned off.
In Ukraine, the action took place for the first time in 2009 — Kyiv joined it, and the lights were turned off on Independence Square, the buildings of the government quarter, and St. Sophia Cathedral. Since then, the initiative covers dozens of cities every year.
This promotion has a second, lesser-known part – Earth Hour Virtual Spotlight – in social networks and media users are encouraged to make publications on this day dedicated to the protection of nature and climate. This became especially relevant after the 2020 pandemic, when mass gatherings were impossible.
The action is not aimed at saving electricity as an end in itself. The reduction in consumption during “Earth Hour” is only a few megawatts for the country – but its task is different: to show the large-scale symbolic unity from which a particular ecodia can begin.
In some countries, “Earth Hour” turns into a “week of actions” — for example, in Italy, the Netherlands and Japan, tree planting days, lectures in schools, information campaigns in government structures, and restrictions on the use of cars are held.
Despite its simple nature, the campaign regularly becomes politically sensitive. For example, in China, certain regions do not support Earth Hour due to fears that it will be interpreted as a criticism of the country’s energy policy.
Historical events on this day
1842 — the American doctor Crawford Williamson Long first used ether as a means of anesthesia. This became a revolution in medicine: for the first time, surgical intervention — removal of a tumor on the neck — took place without pain for the patient. Since then, ether and other inhaled anesthetics have changed the principles of surgery around the world.
1853 — a different type of light appeared in Lviv: a kerosene lamp, designed by Yohan Zeg, Ignatius Lukasevich and Adam Bratkovskii, lit up for the first time in a local pharmacy. It was a breakthrough in household lighting – kerosene became a cheaper and safer alternative to candles and allowed the active life of cities and villages to be transferred to the evening hours.
1856 — one of the first “modern” European wars ended: a peace treaty was signed in Paris, which put an end to the Crimean War. The Ottoman Empire, Russia, France, Great Britain, and Sardinia established a new balance of power in the Black Sea region—formally, but not for long.
1867 — The Russian Empire sold Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to the United States. The price is a symbolic $7.2 million, or about two cents per acre. Today, this sale is perceived as one of the most underrated geopolitical deals in the world – with huge deposits of oil and gold that were later discovered in these lands.
1870 — The US took another step toward real citizenship for all: the 15th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed that voting rights could not be limited by race or former slave status. This legally cemented the victory over slavery, although in practice discrimination remained in the system for a long time.
1888 — a tragic day for the Boyki town of Skole: a big fire destroyed a third of its houses. The cities of Western Ukraine in the 19th century often suffered from such disasters – wood was the main building material, and the fire protection system was almost non-existent.
1917 — in Kyiv, a crowd dismantled a monument to Peter Stolypin on the current Independence Square. It was a symbolic act in the days of the revolution, when not only the regime fell, but also those associated with it.
1918 — in Baku, Bolshevik troops began a three-day massacre, during which about 12 thousand Azerbaijanis died. The events known as the “March events” are one of the bloodiest episodes in the struggle for the Caucasus during the civil war.
1922 — the Berezil theater-studio was created in Kyiv under the leadership of Lesya Kurbas — one of the most prominent centers of Ukrainian modern theater, later repressed, but leaving behind a powerful school and tradition.
1972 — Great Britain introduced direct rule in Northern Ireland. It was a reaction to the bloody escalation of the conflict between Catholics and Protestants, which turned into decades of terror, repression and political paralysis.
1975 — North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon, effectively marking the end of the Vietnam War. The defeat of the USA and the southern regime became one of the most resonant geopolitical defeats in the 20th century.
1981 — there was an assassination attempt on US President Ronald Reagan in Washington. He was wounded, but survived – and this incident later only reinforced his public image as a “strong leader”.
1987 — Van Gogh’s painting “Sunflowers” sold for a record $39.85 million at auction Christie’s in London. It was one of the first sensations on the art market, which made impressionism an object of investment.
1990 — Estonia announced preparations for leaving the USSR. It was not yet a formal declaration of independence, but a point of no return in the Baltic resistance to Moscow.
1992 — in the USA, a court in Portland ordered the tobacco corporation Philip Morris to pay $81 million to the family of a man who died of lung cancer after 40 years of smoking. It was the first major court ruling against the tobacco industry in history.
1995 — Pope John Paul II issued the eleventh encyclical The Gospel of Life, where he categorically condemned abortions and euthanasia, calling them crimes that cannot be legalized.
1998 — BMW buys the legendary British company Rolls-Royce for $570 million. The deal exemplified the transformation of a luxury brand into a global asset — guided by German engineering tradition.
Introduction of a new unit of length — the meter
On March 30, 1791, the National Assembly of France, on the initiative of a number of academics (Condorce, Lagrange, Laplace, Monge and others), introduced a new unit of length – the meter, as a single universal unit of measurement. The National Assembly defined the meter by the length of the meridian—one forty-millionth of the Paris meridian—and even made the meter standard out of an alloy of 90% platinum and 10% iridium.
According to the current definition, a meter is the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 seconds.
During the reign of Napoleon, the metric system spread in many European countries. The advantages of its use were so obvious that even after the removal of Napoleon from power, the introduction of metric units continued:
in 1816 — in Belgium and the Netherlands,
in 1832 — in Portugal,
in 1849 — in Spain and Greece,
in 1870 — in Germany,
in 1873 — in Austria,
in 1875 — in Switzerland.
On May 20, 1875, seventeen states (including the Russian Empire) signed the “Metric Convention”, on the basis of which the meter was recognized as a unit of length and the kilogram as a unit of mass in the participating countries.
In 1889, an accurate international meter standard was produced – from an alloy of 90% platinum and 10% iridium, with a cross section in the shape of the letter “X”. Copies of this standard were deposited in countries that accepted the meter as a standard unit of length.
However, the first measure of length, the first “ruler” was the person himself – he compared the length of objects with his body, its parts, and his own capabilities. And it was convenient, although not always accurate. Imagine: one rod (rod) adopted in England was equal to the length of the left feet of 16 people who left the temple after the morning service on Sunday. One-sixteenth part of the rod corresponded to a foot, which means “foot” in English.
The emergence of psychoanalysis
On March 30, 1896, the world first heard about psychoanalysis. In the fourth volume of the Paris journal “Revue Neurologique”, published that day, an eight-page article “Heredity and the etiology of the neuroses” was printed in French by the then little-known 40-year-old Viennese psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). The issue of the magazine was dedicated to the eminent French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who had died three years earlier and was widely known to the public, in particular for his “soothing of the soul”. It was in the Charcot clinic that Freud underwent an internship in 1885–1886. The first works of the future psychoanalyst only outlined the contours of a theory that would later become revolutionary: the idea of the basic role of the subconscious and sexual in the formation of the psyche.
Just imagine – the end of the 19th – the beginning of the 20th century, a time of rapid progress and industrial revolution! In medicine, new truths are discovered one after another – toxins, viruses, bacteria… And then Freud appears, all in white, and declares that all this is nonsense, and the real causes of human suffering lie not in microbes, but in the psyche itself, and only there. Moreover, he is the first to simply talk to patients and make their experiences the subject of scientific analysis. Later, despite the categorical rejection of psychoanalysis by a number of authoritative doctors, Freudianism gained wide popularity in the world.
Many believe that Freud himself also needed a doctor. For example, he was afraid of the numbers 6 and 2 all his life – he never stayed in hotels with more than 61 rooms, so as not to even accidentally get a room with an “unlucky” number. And on February 6, he tried not to leave the house at all. He always demanded to be listened to as attentively as possible, did not tolerate any discussions and never looked people in the eye – even during seances. This is how the famous couch in the psychoanalyst’s office appeared.
