Doctors’ Advice for Dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder

Health Wellness

In January, we posted asking: How Real is Seasonal Affective Disorder?

As fall moves towards winter and daylight hours diminish, it’s time to not only re-hash what seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is and how to deal with it.

I’ve heard a number of people scoff at the reality that people suffer from a form of depression when the daylight hours get shorter or there are multiple consecutive days of cloud cover. They believe it’s an excuse for their behavior and laziness.

As shared before, I worked with a young man who suffered from SAD. He had a PhD in astronomy and was a very bright young man. He attended college in Colorado, where there were fewer cloudy days. He could have attended several great universities closer to his hometown, but he lived in the Midwest where there were more cloudy days than sunny days. After receiving his degree, he worked for an organization in the Midwest that, like his hometown, had more cloudy days that sunny ones. But after a few years, he left a job he loved to take one out west where there was more sunshine and less clouds.

I personally saw what the cloudy and winter days did to him and that’s when I better understood that SAD was real and how much it could affect someone.

Yes, seasonal affective disorder is real and for some people, it can be quite debilitating and interfere with their normal and work functioning. It’s not just me who says it’s real, but check out these two sources:

According to the National Institute of Mental Health:

“Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is a type of depression that comes and goes with the seasons, typically starting in the late fall and early winter and going away during the spring and summer. Depressive episodes linked to the summer can occur, but are much less common than winter episodes of SAD.”

According to the Mayo Clinic:

“Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a type of depression that’s related to changes in seasons — SAD begins and ends at about the same times every year. If you’re like most people with SAD, your symptoms start in the fall and continue into the winter months, sapping your energy and making you feel moody. Less often, SAD causes depression in the spring or early summer.”

Exactly how the lack of sunlight causes this type of depression in some people is not fully understood, but there are several prevailing theories:

1- Less exposure to sunlight somehow impacts the body’s internal biological clock which governs sleep, mood and the release of certain hormones.

2- Less sunlight causes a change or shift in some neurotransmitters in the brain, such as serotonin.

3- Less sunlight is believed to have an impact on the body’s production of melatonin, a chemical directly related to sleep. The lack of melatonin results in a lack of sleep which in turn results in fatigue and depression.

If you, or someone you know suffers from SAD, some doctors have the following recommendations to help and it’s simple. They recommend the use of special daylight light bulbs for a minimum of 20 minutes a day. The worse one suffers from SAD, the longer one should spend under the daylight light bulbs.

My former co-worker also took supplements of melatonin and serotonin during the winter and when we had day after day of cloudy weather. He said they helped, along with having daylight bulbs in his office, but he still longed for the sunny climate of the west.

 

Depression Seasonal Affective Disorder

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