In This Site
SAD Symptoms
Weight gain
Carbohydrate craving
Oversleeping
Lack of energy
Decreased sex drive
Indecisiveness
Lack of concentration
Apathy
Anxiety
Suicidal thoughts
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What are the
causes of depression?
Seasonal
Affective Disorder
Taken from an ABC News
story...
Oct. 14
— Back in the early 1980s, a handful
of experts at the National Institute of Mental Health had a
wild idea: If people get depressed when the days get darker,
why not just give them more light?
They tested their theory on Herb
Kern, a 63-year-old research engineer who fell into a deep
blue funk every fall. They built a 2-foot by 4-foot metal
box, inserted bright fluorescent bulbs, covered it with a
plastic screen and asked Kern to sit in front of it for
three hours before dawn and three hours after sunset every
day.
It worked. Three days later, Kern was smiling again. In
the 15 years since then, further studies have shown the
effectiveness of light therapy—using brighter lights and
shorter treatment times—for patients with winter depression,
known medically as seasonal affective disorder or SAD. An
estimated 10 million Americans have SAD. But questions remained: How, exactly, does light
therapy work? Is it scientifically valid? Should people with
SAD be “lit” in the morning or evening?
Read it and (Don’t) Weep
Three studies published today in the Archives of General
Psychiatry answer some of those questions. And together
with two enthusiastic editorials, the studies push light
therapy solidly into the mental health mainstream.
“Light is as effective as drugs, perhaps more so,”
writes Anna Wirz-Justice of the Psychiatric University
Clinic in Basel, Switzerland. The three studies “provide the
best evidence to date.” Some psychiatry purists have sniffed that light therapy
is “merely a placebo response by mildly neurotic middle-aged
women who don’t like nasty drugs,” says Wirz-Justice. But
now there’s proof enough for skeptics that light therapy is
for real.
Advocates expect that this week’s news will convince
even more mental health therapists to use bright lights for
their depressed patients, and may convince more insurance
companies to cover the roughly $300 cost of the light boxes.
Springtime in December
For one of the studies, Charmane Eastman, a psychologist at
Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago,
tested 96 SAD patients. She found that 61 percent of people
who got morning light therapy and 50 percent of people who
got evening light therapy experienced nearly complete
recovery from their seasonal depression after four weeks of
treatment.
Only 32 percent of people who got a placebo treatment
enjoyed that same degree of remission. What makes Eastman’s study so remarkable is what she
used as her placebo, or dummy treatment. Other studies have
used dimmer light boxes, or boxes that emitted different
colored lights. But patients who didn’t get the bright white
light could clearly see that they weren’t getting the good
stuff, and skeptics said that discouragement might have been
the reason they didn’t respond well.
Eastman, however, used a negative ion generator as the
placebo. Adding invisible negative ions to the air might
actually fight winter depression (because summer air
contains more negative ions), so patients found the
treatment believable. But Eastman deactivated the device,
adding a humming noise that made it seem like it was working
when it was turned on.
So, even though patients fully expected the sham
treatment might help them, and did get some relief from
their depression, they didn’t recover as completely as
patients who got bright light. And that means that light
therapy must have some kind of actual biological effect.
Skeptic Turns Believer
Ironically, Eastman herself had been considered a skeptic
because her earlier experiments showed that light therapy
didn’t work any better than a placebo. “There was a little
black cloud of doubt” hanging over light therapy, she says.
“I’m sure people are saying, ‘If she believes it now, it’s
got to be true.’”
A second study provided similar findings. Dr. Michael Terman, a psychiatrist at Columbia University in New York,
compared light therapy to treatment with high- or
low-density negative ion emitters. (His ion machines were
working.) He found that light-therapy patients did 30
percent better than those who got the low-density ions.
Patients who got high-density ions did just as well as
light-therapy patients, indicating that the high-dose ions
might also be helpful in treating SAD.
The third study, by Dr. Alfred Lewy of Oregon Health
Sciences University in Portland, compared the effectiveness
of light therapy given in the morning or the evening. He
found morning therapy at least twice as effective as evening
therapy. Taken together, these studies offer a 1-2-3 punch in
favor of light therapy, at least for winter depression. It’s
less costly than antidepressant drugs, patients like it and
the side effects are relatively mild. Now, researchers say,
it’s time to start testing light therapy on other
conditions, like jet lag, premenstrual syndrome, nonseasonal
depression and sleep disorders.
Why Winter
Makes Us SAD
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Think of winter depression
as four months of jet lag. The human body has hundreds of 24-hour biological
rhythms (called circadian rhythms), all controlled by one
“internal clock.” The sleep cycle is one rhythm. Body
temperature is another. The brain’s production of certain
chemicals, like the nighttime hormone melatonin, is
another.
In the summer, we wake up with the sun and go to bed
when it gets dark, so our body’s internal clock is in
synch with the sun. But in the winter, most of us force
ourselves to wake up while it’s still dark. And that means
that the sleep-wake circadian rhythm is out of step with
the other rhythms, which we can’t control with an alarm
clock.
Scientists
suspect that light therapy helps fight winter depression
because it kicks the other biological rhythms, namely
melatonin, into step with our artificially manipulated
sleep cycle.
A study by Dr. Alfred Lewy, of Oregon Health Sciences
University in Portland, supports that theory because it
showed that morning light is more effective than evening
light. Bright lights suppress the brain’s secretion of
melatonin. In other words, your hormones want you to stay
sleeping, but the light convinces them that it’s time to
wake up.
For roughly 80 percent of SAD patients, melatonin
levels peak just when it’s time to wake up. For them,
morning light therapy is best. For others, melatonin drops
too soon, and they find themselves waking up in the middle
of the night. For those patients, evening light therapy
might work better.
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There is hope! You may want to sign up
to join the online support group and get some terrific support. IF YOU ARE SEVERELY DEPRESSED NOW PLEASE GET
PROFESSIONAL HELP IMMEDIATELY!
If you are
feeling suicidal please call 1-800-784-2433 |
White light has
been proven to cure Seasonal Depression |
