So there’s definitely an upside to naming things like that. If you have a name for a group of symptoms, some of the interventions that helped one person with those symptoms might be likely to help someone else. I can see why they would want to give a name to a fuzzy and general tendency like SAD, even if it isn’t a categorical, testable thing, like pregnancy or gangrene is a thing. Seemingly, SAD is just what you call it when nothing particularly explains your winter funk. The more I read about it, the more I get the sense that SAD isn’t really a thing, it’s just a label to describe the tendency for some people to get depressed and anxious in winter, regardless of the (perhaps untraceable) particular factors behind it. Given the uncertainty implied by that many variables, I looked up how a person is supposed to determine that their mood shift is because of SAD, and not, say, because they really miss Major League Baseball, or because they’re no longer getting certain phytochemicals from their backyard-grown kale, or anything else.Īpparently the litmus test for Seasonal Affective Disorder is that “your mood suffers along with the season change.” A doctor can try to rule out other, non-calendar-associated causes with tests, but there’s no way to test for SAD. There are a thousand variables that could potentially tilt the mood equation towards bleaker feelings during this part of the year. I think I do, but how would I know for sure? It could be that I dislike Christmas shopping so much that my mood withers every December, or that I go for fewer walks when sidewalks are icy, or that Terry’s Chocolate Orange inflames my frontal cortex. Not everyone gets this thing we call Seasonal Affective Disorder. This sends many people into a compromised state for some of the year, until their part of the planet wobbles its way back around into the thicker light. So we have a thing we call winter, whose days tend to be low in certain mood-improving qualities (light, warmth) and high in certain mood-diminishing qualities (cold, isolation). They admired summer’s golden daffodils and shy sumacs, and lamented winter’s specter-grey frost and northward-thronging robins, probably unaware that the changing seasons aren’t some universal system of order, but a peculiar and convoluted local side-effect of two large rocks having collided long ago. They noticed the way the sun’s arc changed throughout the year, and mused about the flamboyant moods and cycles of nature. Eventually, some of them became philosophers and poets, who described this condition and its meaning to the rest of us. Under this strange condition, Earth’s creatures evolved and thrived. According to scientists, an gargantuan space object hit the earth during its formation, knocking it into a tilted, wobbly spin, which is the reason there’s a summer and a winter. Several billion years ago, a cosmic accident occurred that would eventually make some of us periodically unhappy.
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