I wonder how many of us are SAD? Not sad sad, but SAD, seasonal affective disorder. It’s a kind of depression that people experience in the long, dark days of winter. According to the NHS website, the symptoms are:
a persistent low mood
a loss of pleasure or interest in normal everyday activities
irritability
feelings of despair, guilt and worthlessness
feeling lethargic (lacking in energy) and sleepy during the day
sleeping for longer than normal and finding it hard to get up in the morning
craving carbohydrates and gaining weight
I reckon quite of lot of us suffer in varying degrees.
When I say it’s a “kind of depression”, what I mean is that all these symptoms relate to depression itself. It’s just that for many, they only usually appear in winter time, whereas us clinical nut cases have them pretty well all the time.
There was once a time when SAD was mocked, just like all other kinds of mental illnesses were mocked; as if people could just “snap out of it”. I’d like to think that scientific and medical evidence is having a profound effect.
Having not actually been diagnosed with SAD, I do know that my own mood, currently on the middling side of low to middling, responds positively to the Big Yellow Thing In The Sky, even more so to the the blue skies and blue sea. It’s not a cure in itself but it is, to my untrained eyes, nature’s anti-depressant at work.
If you think you have SAD, see your GP. It might just be more than being pissed off with this rubbish British climate and given some treatment – you may need to wait until next summer to actually be seen, though – that could eventually made you less SAD.
