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Who is at risk for SAD?

Thursday, April 19th, 2012

Light Therapy Tip for the week:

Who is at risk for Seasonal Affective Disorder?

Many Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers might wonder why they are affected by this disorder. Although many people do develop this condition, some are more at risk than others for being diagnosed with SAD. It can depend on your sex, geographic location and genetics. SAD can affect adults, teens and even children.

According to research, more females are diagnosed with SAD than males. This does not mean that men do not get SAD. It simply means, development of SAD is more rare in men. However, if a male does develop SAD, studies indicate their symptoms will be worse.

Where you live also influences how likely you are to develop SAD because development of the disease depends on sunlight and weather. One study on SAD found the rate of people affected was seven times higher in New Hampshire than Florida. SAD appears to be more common among people who live far north or south of the equator.

All mental illnesses usually involve some sort of family history. As with other types of depression, studies do show if SAD runs in the family, than you are more likely to develop the disease than someone who does not have relatives with the condition.

If you think you suffer from SAD talk with your physician. If you’ve been diagnosed, check out our website for more information at alaskanorthernlights.com.

Tags: 10000 lux, Bright light therapy, Broad Spectrum, Depression, Light box, Light Therapy, light therapy for sad, SAD, SAD light, SAD lights, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Severe Depression, Winter Blues, Winter Depression
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Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

Those that have survived the winter and Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) still need to be an the alert for Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Many of us can hardly wait for summer to arrive, but a small number of people are much happier when it’s over. You’ve no doubt heard of Seasonal Affective Disorder, the wintertime mood disorder — but some get SAD in the summer.

As hot weather approaches, those with summer SAD sleep less, eat less, and lose weight. They’re extremely irritable and agitated. (It’s the reverse for people with winter SAD, who sleep more, gain weight and crave high-carb foods, and tend to slow down and socially hibernate from late fall to early spring.)

Summer-onset depression is thought to affect less than 1 percent of the population, making it much rarer than the winter variety experienced by an estimated 5 percent of people.

In its most severe form, people with summer seasonal depression may be more at risk for suicide than cold-weather SAD, says Dr. Norman Rosenthal, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical School, who has studied both types and first helped discover their existence. “Suicide is more of a concern when people are depressed and agitated rather than depressed and lethargic,” he explains.

When summer depression was first recognized in 1986, Rosenthal said that mental health professionals suspected the cause was the heat and humidity. That, he said, lent itself to the idea that a cold shower, air conditioning, swimming in cold lakes or heading North would relieve symptoms. Although these treatments for hot-weather depression are useful for some, they lack the staying power that light-box therapy has on winter SAD.

‘The light is cutting though me like a knife’
A person with summer SAD can stay inside, crank up the AC, and darken the room but then go outside into the heat and it’s as if they’ve never been treated, explains Rosenthal, the author of “Winter Blues.”

Another idea is that it might be the light itself that’s aggravating sufferers, whether it’s the intensity of sunlight or the angle it’s coming at people. One of Rosenthal’s summer depression patients describes it as “feeling like the light is cutting though me like a knife.”

Still another possibility is that there may be two kinds of warm-weather depression, says Dr. Alfred Lewy, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. He suggests there might be one group of people who have an unpleasant reaction to the heat and humidity — a discomfort with the climate. But even in Portland where summers aren’t that hot or humid, he’s seen patients struggle with summer depression.

Lewy suspects the cause in a second group might be that the body’s natural clock, it’s circadian rhythms, are misaligning in summer. Instead of cueing to dawn, the longer daylight is causing some vulnerable people to cue to dusk. Cueing to dusk shortens the typical body clock and delays a person’s sleep-wake cycle. This mismatch, theorizes Lewy, may be triggering depression.

He successfully treated a person with summer depression with a combination of getting early morning sunlight (30 to 60 minutes daily), which shifts the body clock forward, and low-dose melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep-wake cycles. Severe symptoms may also benefit from antidepressants.

Do you secretly — or perhaps not-so-secretly — loathe the summer months? What helps you get through them?

Tags: Bright light therapy, Depression, Light box, Light Therapy, Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder, SAD light, SAD lights, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Severe Depression, Summer SAD, Summer-onset depression, Winter Depression
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Nation’s Most Downbeat City?

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

Interesting article on Aol.

The Gallup polling organization put a simple question to the residents of 190 metropolitan areas: “Would you say your city or town is getting better as a place to live?”

The responses are in, and Binghamton, N.Y., has been named the least optimistic place in America.

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being index tracks community satisfaction and optimism on a daily basis by conducting telephone interviews with adult residents of U.S. cities and their surrounding areas. In 2011, Binghamtonians expressed the lowest recorded level of optimism: Only 27.8 percent voiced a positive feeling about their community’s prospects.

In Provo-Orem, Utah, on the other hand — the country’s most optimistic region, according to this poll — 76 percent of residents expressed confidence about the direction of their area.

As to the reasons why, The Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin suggests that the weather and economy are valid reasons for pessimism. Seasonal affective disorder, which can bring on bouts of depression typically in the winter, could be a contributing factor, but Binghamton’s malaise is also a product of its residents’ outlook. “The community is rather conservative and not very open-minded,” psychologist Benjamin Perkus told the Press & Sun-Bulletin. “So it’s stuck in the old paradigm of big industry, which is gone now.”

Settled in 1802, the once-agrarian Binghamton became a transportation hub and manufacturing center with the advent of the Erie Railroad in the 1840s. In the 20th century, IBM was founded close by and the flight simulator was developed in town, creating a robust local outpost of electronics and defense contracting. The end of the Cold War, however, saw the drying up of funds for many defense firms, costing the region jobs. From a peak of 85,000 in the mid-1950s, the city’s population has declined to less than 50,000.

Still, there are bright points, like the educational scene, centered around Binghamton University, and a local opera company and a symphony, as well as sports teams. Residents’ pessimism may have been influenced by flooding that occurred last year, when the survey was being conducted.

New York’s Syracuse and Utica-Rome also fared poorly in the survey, coming in at numbers 186 and 183, respectively. But Binghamton stood out, according to Gallup, for its “difficult combination” of relatively dreary satisfaction and optimism ratings. Only 74.9 percent of Binghamton area residents said they were satisfied with their community, which doesn’t sound so bad — except that it was the fourth-lowest figure among the 190 areas surveyed. Binghamton’s 27.8 percent optimism rating contrasts sharply with the national average among resident of small metro areas, which was 56.5 percent.

Article from Aol.

Tags: Depression, Light box, Light Therapy, North Star 10, SAD, SAD lights, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Severe Depression, Winter Blues, Winter Depression
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SAD Is Real – But Treatable

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

Sadly, depression is not something many people truly understand. They are blaming themselves and feel helpless to change. Fortunately, there are many ways in which you can treat your depression. Read this entire article for ideas you can apply daily to lift yourself, or someone you love, out of depression.

To deal with depression, join a support group. Talk with other people battling the disease to understand what you’re going through. These people can offer ideas so you can have help along the way.

When you take any kind of depression pills, you need to build a routine. When you commit to a habitual schedule, remembering your medication will come naturally. Taking your medication early will help you get through the day.

Concentrate on just a few problems at any one time, and tackle them in small, manageable steps. Trying to fix too many problems all at the same time is overwhelming, and only leads to failure and makes everything worse.

Depression can be treated effectively with interpersonal therapy and behavioral therapy, which simply means talking it out and changing the behaviors that contribute to your depression. Interpersonal therapy deals with how you deal with your relationships. Cognitive behavior therapy helps the patient change the way they approach the world and how to better handle issues that arise.

Besides medication, a variety of techniques can be employed to decrease the symptoms of depression and improve the sufferers general mood. You have information at your fingertips that will help you. Use the advice provided here to help you make the changes you need in order to improve your life.

Tags: Bright light therapy, Depression, Light box, Light Therapy, light therapy for sad, SAD, SAD light, SAD lights, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Severe Depression, Sleep disorders, Support, Winter Blues, Winter Depression
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Time Change Blues

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

It’s just one hour, but it throws people off of their day when they don’t have it.

Daylight Saving Time begins this month and that means the mornings are getting a little darker and everyone will be losing one hour of sleep. This change has a direct effect on everyone’s internal cycles, causing crankiness, rushing, tardiness — even heart attacks and increased traffic accidents.

“It’s stressful to get up before your brain has decided that it is time to have you alert and awake and functioning,” said Dr. Marlin Hoover, a psychologist at the Family Medicine Center at Memorial Medical Center. “So that increases the stress related to getting up an hour early.”

In a 1996 study, results showed an 8 percent increase in traffic accidents after the time change. In another study, researchers found that there was a 5 percent increase in heart attacks after the time shift, according to My Health News Daily.

These small studies ring true to Hoover, who agreed that losing an hour of rest does affect people, most of whom don’t enough sleep in the first place.

Breaking the cycle

Most people’s energy follows a cycle, and energy levels vary throughout the day in a predictable pattern. Typically, midnight is the time when the energy level is the lowest; by 6 a.m., energy is climbing drastically as the body is waking up and doing things; and it peaks around noon. It’s downhill from there, with a moderate peak around 4 p.m. and then a continuous downward trend back into the lowest energetic point at midnight.

It’s difficult to shift this cycle — which is exactly what Daylight Saving Time does to everyone — if you don’t prepare for it. It takes three to seven days for a person to get back on track.

“And for that reason, people on swing shifts have much higher accident rates,” Hoover said. These people can never change their cycles to where they have the most energy in the middle of the night, while they are working.

“If you get somebody up, then, an hour early, their body is already cranked up. And you’re adding the stress of being up, not feeling good, and having to manage things, which means driving, even, is going to be more stressful,” Hoover said.

About the time a person is dreaming, their heart rate and blood pressure is going up. This time is usually around the time a person wakes up.

When a person has to get up earlier, during this dream state, they add more pressure, which leads to more heart attacks. This time in the morning is also the time more heart attacks happen year-round, Hoover said.

Bright and early

Light also causes people’s energy to swing. Because time is springing forward, that means the mornings will be a little darker than they have been. This leads to slow mornings, when people feel drowsy and unenthusiastic to start their day.

When bright sunlight hits the retinas of the eye, that sends a signal to the reticular activating system, a part of the brain that tells the body to wake up.

“That’s why people tend to feel best in the summer; it’s because there is the most ambient light,” Hoover said.

Emotions are also tied into the amount of light people are exposed to. In a condition called Seasonal Affective Disorder, or seasonal depression, people feel depressed and they have no energy, especially during winter, when less sunlight reaches them — or during Daylight Saving Time, when mornings are darker and evenings are brighter.

Psychologists have a treatment for this: light therapy, which exposes patients to bright light that resembles that of the sun.

“Exposing the eyes to light will give a little bump to the energy and move the curve to a little bit earlier,” Hoover said about the energy cycle.

There is a cure for the time change blues, too. In the weeks before Daylight Saving Time begins, you can adjust your alarm clock to ring 15 minutes before it’s usually set to go off. Increase 15 more minutes every week. By the time March 11 comes around, your body should already be used to getting up an hour early.

Tags: Bright light therapy, Daylight Savings Time, Depression, Light box, Light Therapy, SAD, SAD light, SAD lights, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Severe Depression, Winter Blues, Winter Depression
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