Hannah May* is a painter and earthy mountain woman. Energetic and prolific, she hikes through the Sierra Nevada with her easel and palette in tow. When the landscape is right, she pitches her tent and pulls out the canvas. So when her husband, Charlie, a chemist, got a job in Michigan, she thought she was in for a new adventure. But that following winter in Ann Arbor, when the days grew short and skies gloomy, she fell into a deep depression.
"My wife paints wonderful landscapes. When we moved to the Great Lakes, her work became sporadic," Charlie says. During the following summer, Hannah took a long trip to California and her mood and productivity picked up. The next winter, back in Michigan, her energy dipped radically once again. The couple had read about winter depression, so Hannah consulted her doctor. The doctor confirmed that she was suffering from seasonal affective disorder.
Also known as SAD, the disorder affects some 10 million Americans. An additional 25 million Americans suffer from a milder form of the condition. For both severe and mild depressives, the problem may lie in the amount of sunlight they get. Less sunlight (often in northern latitudes) can trigger symptoms such as cravings for sweets and carbohydrates, weight gain, low energy, sleepiness, social withdrawal and lack of interest in work.
The Inner Clock
Interestingly, SAD has been found to be more common in creative people like Hannah. Poet Emily Dickinson showed seasonal changes of mood and productivity in her writing. She wrote three times as many poems in the summers of 1858 and 1859 as she had in the falls and winters of those years. And overall, her poems and letters written in winter tended to involve darker thoughts of loneliness and death, while letters and poems written in spring and summer were more joyful and optimistic in tone.
Based on this and other data, a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry speculates that Dickinson may have had seasonal affective disorder. "Perhaps her sensitivity to the seasons was the same sensitivity that allowed her to write so beautifully," suggests study author John McDermott, M.D., professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Hawaii School of Medicine.
In other patients with SAD, such as New York City interior designer Kate Smith*, the symptoms are many. When her SAD is at its worst, Kate may sleep some 12 to 16 hours a day, lose interest in work and exercise, crave foods like pizza and chocolate and isolate herself socially. Looking for a boost, she may drink up to three cups of coffee and six Diet Cokes a day (double her usual intake) yet feel no effect from the caffeine.
Although very little is known about what causes seasonal depression, researchers are making headway. In a recent study in the Archives of General Psychiatry, scientists reported that people with SAD generate a biological signal that the season is changing. This is similar to the type of cues bears get when it is time to hibernate. This signal, however, is absent in people who don't have SAD.
Just as researchers are learning more about the disorder, more treatment options are becoming available. In Hannah's case, she opted to try natural supplements including St. John's wort. "There was a marked difference. My mood and energy picked up, and I was painting a lot," she says. Exercising regularly and eating a balanced diet also helped her stay on track.
Light of Day
Another effective treatment is light therapy. Michael Terman, Ph.D., director of the winter-depression program at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York says, "Using bright-light therapy to shift the internal circadian clock is the most effective intervention we know about. But proper timing is critical." Terman's recent work has centered on this timing.
In a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, Terman and his colleagues showed that the ideal time to administer bright-light therapy is about 2.5 to 4 hours after the midpoint of sleep, the optimal time for shifting the internal clock earlier. Terman says that timing the light this way can double the antidepressant response, when compared with light therapy used at any other time of day.
So, if a severe case of winter blues is getting you down, talk to your doctor. Chances are, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
*Identities have been changed.
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seasonal changes,
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