When it starts getting cold outside and dark earlier, many of us feel like snuggling up in a blanket and just going to sleep as soon as we get home from work. But for as many as 14 million Americans, winter can bring on a period of major depression. They start eating more, experience a low mood for weeks, and feel like sleeping rather than taking part in their normal hobbies or social groups. These people suffer from seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, a condition that is largely misunderstood by the public. Let’s set the record straight about these nine SAD myths.
It’s synonymous with depressionSeasonal Affective Disorder is a type of depression, but it doesn’t necessarily have the same symptoms as the “classic” depression that most of us are familiar with. Depression can refer to many different mood disorders, most of them involving low moods. Other symptoms we commonly associate with depression include thoughts of suicide, insomnia, changes in weight, and withdrawal from social activities. SAD normally involves the blues, weight gain, and can bring about some of the other symptoms, but many people don’t experience the deep sadness and therefore don’t even realize they have SAD. Instead, they just think they’re low on energy, causing them to sleep more, eat more, and stay in a lot. The drop in temperature is the cause
Some of us might get sad when it gets cold because we can’t wear our cute summer clothes anymore or spend quality time outside. But true SAD isn’t significantly affected by the temperature. The most widely accepted cause of SAD is a decrease in exposure to sunlight. Since skies are often more overcast in the winter and nights are longer, the mood disorder is often associated with wintertime and its colder temperatures. But someone who moves to an area with less sunlight but similar temperatures can still easily develop seasonal affective disorder. It only occurs in the winter
The majority of SAD cases do crop up in the days between fall and spring, but there are instances of people getting the symptoms during other seasons. This is sometimes called reverse SAD or summer (or spring as the case may be) SAD. The exact symptoms are slightly different, since reverse SAD sufferers tend to lose weight and have trouble sleeping. There’s a greater occurrence of this variant of SAD cases in warmer areas and places near the equator, maybe because of changes in barometric pressure and rainfall. Read more
