Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

The fall equinox was yesterday, when we teetered at the perfect balance of day and night. And now the wheel cranks toward darkness – we’ll be losing daylight until the winter solstice on Dec. 21. The loss of light can chip away at a person’s psyche, and for many people it turns into a condition more serious than just a bad mood.  Seasonal depression is centuries-old, but only in the last couple of decades did medical professionals finally gave it a name: Seasonal Affective Disorder – or, charmingly, “SAD.”

Like most mood conditions, there are several different variations, but there are general symptoms to look for. According to the Mayo Clinic, typical symptoms include depression, hopelessless, anxiety, loss of energy, social withdrawal, oversleeping, difficulty concentrating, and appetite changes.

My personal symptoms include forgoing social invitations in favor of listening to Leonard Cohen repeatedly, re-reading Russian novels, depending madly on coffee, and being too lazy to unscrew the childproof cap to my multivitamins.

These tendencies return like clockwork every winter (now you know why I moved away from Alaska). And that’s why, when my parents sent me a Happy Light for my birthday, I tried to quell my shudders of skepticism long enough to open the box.

Yes, I’m considering light therapy. It’s taking some imagination to transfer my old idea of therapy (sitting on a couch talking to a bespectacled shrink a la Woody Allen) to the contents of this box: a lamp that will deliver 10,000 lux of light to my soon-to-be sun-starved pupils.

My doctor says that now is the time to start; like taking vitamins to keep from getting sick, it’s best to start light therapy before the real darkness hits. But there are different schools of thought on light therapy. A quick scan of medical sites and and psychology journals shows that light therapy isn’t recommended for everyone. Some doctors say that light therapy could be useless or even dangerous, and prefer to treat SAD like any other type of depression – with medication and/or counseling. Whatever your perspective, there’s plentiful information for those who are light-curious.

Does the loss of light in winter affect you? What do you do to prevent the downward spiral? Comment below!