Tis The Season…
Christmas is coming and the nights are drawing in. But for some of us this is not the season to be jolly. Victoria Kingham describes her experience of living with Seasonal Affective Disorder.
November: time for jolly wizards and witches, grinning green faces. Cheerful fireworks: a man nearly changed the course of British history but we burn his effigy in celebration of the continuation of our glorious English parliament. Clocks go back, evenings expand and erase what, just a couple of months before, were mellow late-afternoons, tea and cakes, drinks on the patio. TV ads now show children delighted by nauseating plastic toys, or running after virtual balls wielding invisible racquets with impossibly handsome, implausibly enthusiastic dads. The garden shrivels under sudden morning cold. I sit in the gloom listening to the wind shouting round the gables, and watch back-to-back episodes of Law And Order. What happened to summer’s joie-de-vivre? What’s the point of me?
WELCOME TO BRAVE NEW WORLD
Those of you struggling to read this, but simultaneously empathising, will recognise the syndrome. Seasonal Affective Disorder, SAD. The dark seeps into your psyche in this chill time. Normal getting up, washing, dressing, and reading seem heavily arduous. Creativity, originality? Puh, who can be bothered? Who cares? The NHS list adds to these features a craving for carbohydrates and gaining weight, and a depleted sex drive. The Wikipedia entry recognises a ‘mood disorder subset’. Disorder: so there’s a proper order? If we deviate, then we need chemical or psychological adjustment. Welcome to Brave New World, let’s all have some soma. My self-administered soma is online scrabble. I’m not the only person of age who indulges in on-line games – the harmless, one-to-one kind, not the fiercely interactive kind where you have to kill people you’ve never met. Oh sorry, that’s real life.
GLAD investigates SAD
An organisation, GLAD, investigates the SAD phenomenon. Genetic Links to Anxiety and Depression. Bizarrely appropriate initials. Sign on, and let them test your saliva. Is this something you feel, or after all have you inherited it? In that case your feelings become a syndrome and they can work on a ‘correctional’ treatment, or perhaps on how to replace the offending piece of DNA. Do they pay you to become a statistic? Maybe not but hey, you can be GLAD you’re not the only one who’s SAD. Would you want a treatment? I would find it odd to feel any different at this time of year. My years see a regular rhythm: euphoria in June, melancholia in December. (Listen to Emika’s Melancholia Euphoria, digital and mechanistic enough to give you the galloping fantods anyway, SAD or not).
GO DROSOPHILA!
Circadian rhythms? Typically, sleeping at night and being awake during the day, the 16/8 routine (20/4 in the case of Margaret Thatcher, 22/2 Leonardo Da Vinci, but you get the picture). Scientists have won Nobel prizes for discoveries concerning fruit flies’ circadian tendencies, Eerily, these flies have a similar genetic make-up to that of humans. A gene controls their little bodies’ clocks, an identifiable protein builds up at night and breaks down during the day. (Go drosophila! You’re probably dead anyway, your 90-day precarious existence at the mercy of Flash, Dettol, Domestos, earwigs, spiders, and ants.) But I remember sleepless years trying to get my babies’ circadian rhythms to match my own – they certainly didn’t have natural 16/8 DNA. But every year the SAD season comes and whoop-de-doo, all my sleep rhythms are messed up. What’s it all for? Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Tell me what am I doing drinking in LA, ooh ah ooh.
I’D RATHER EAT EARWIGS
Finnish researchers have discovered a ‘significant bother-some seasonality in the general population’, using a sample of 5000 using the SPAQ, Seasonal Pattern Assessment Questionnaire. There are other questionnaires: PIDS, SHQ, SCID, SIGH-ADS, even HIGH. YABA, yet another bloody acronym (yes, it’s in the scrabble dictionary). The research evaluates the value of all the questionnaires, to make sure that the mean means the answers mean something statistically. Officially bothersome, SAD has always bothered some of us. You’d expect a significantly higher occurrence in the far north of Europe, given the 19 hours of winter darkness. How do they do it? Contrary to expectation, they only have a middling suicide rate compared to the rest of Europe, as does Iceland. Some of us would like our evenings to be filled with light, cake, and honeysuckle, rather than darkness, cold, and Oyster Bay. I watch for snowdrops in February and their appearance means significantly more than that of just another flower. Spring, life, rebirth, circadian regeneration, ancient runes, Druidic sun-worship, all that. Alternatively, if I’m feeling more Dickensian, just another year older and not a penny richer.
Apparently one successful treatment for this condition is sitting in front of a light box for up to two hours daily. I have no experience of this but personally I’d rather eat earwigs. What do you do while you’re there? Does the box help you do something more constructive, cleaning a tap, ironing, putting a wash on? Wouldn’t an inert box just emphasise my essential pointlessness? And if it does work, then shouldn’t going out for a brisk walk in the bright morning light achieve the same end? That’s if you even feel like getting out of bed. For me, honestly, the best treatment would be some thirty-something fitness instructor with inch-long eyelashes bringing me tea saying hey, come down to the beach and share my new light-box.
RECAPTURE THE RAPTURE
Chemical remedies are still under investigation. Positive results have been obtained from various antidepressants (surprise!) and Vitamin D. The opposite of my own inclinations. Alcohol is the ultimate depressant, but very seductive because its effect initially fools you into thinking otherwise. The temptation then is to keep on drinking, to try to recapture that first careless rapture. I’ve never taken antidepressants, preferring instead to wallow in my low mood, trying to relish the fact that at least I feel the misery, the disinclination to act, the repeated negative thoughts, the bah, humbug to everything.
PICK UP THE PIECES
So, some would still say, pull yourself together, get on with it. Truthfully, there’s some credibility to this approach. For years I found myself wishing that I had the time, the money, and the extended human support necessary to be able to cry, to stagger, simply to stop, as a couple of friends did. But someone had to sort out the children’s dinners, wash their clothes, get them to school, then go out and earn the money to do it all. Short of losing track of reality, there wasn’t a gap in my life even to consider my own mental welfare. There must be thousands like me. There are yet others whose reaction is to ‘turn their face to the wall’, as my mother described her sister’s behaviour. My mother and my grandmother spent
years picking up my aunt’s mental pieces, with long-term family repercussions. But that belongs to a different story.
For myself, now that I have no immediately dependent minors, I have the leisure to contemplate, and accommodate, the inevitability of each year’s personal circadian mood variations. So I look out of the window at the fireworks and the rain and the darkness and the swirling leaves, put on the heating and the television, make a fried cheese sandwich, start yet another scrabble game, and wait for the snowdrops.
• For more inforamtion about SAD visit: www.sada.org.uk and https://news.eastsussex.gov.uk/health-and-care-news-east-sussex/2022/01/10/looking-after-your-mental-health
Seasonal Affective Disorder – SAD
What is SAD?
SAD is a mood disorder in people who usually appear healthy but show traits of depression and heightened anxiety typically in winter.
SAD is a Subtype
People experiencing it are likely to have a wider mental disorder or depression.
Differences between Seasons
Symptoms and behaviours vary depending on the season SAD was triggered.
The Role of Daylight
The brain associates lack of daylight with sleeping and produces melatonin which can induce depression symptoms.
Medicine for Winter Blues
As it is seasonal some people deal with it through short-lived doses of anti-depressants – though some may carry the risk of addiction.
Stress
Lack of sunlight has been linked to stress in the brain.
Light Therapy
One of the easiest ways to counter SAD is to expose yourself to more light – spend more time outdoors if you can.
Natural Solutions
Regular exercise, even walking every morning, will trigger the secretion of endorphins.
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