Certain Nordic people hugging their edge of the world, where winter seems permanently installed with long, cold, dark days, have surprisingly low rates of SAD. I like the snow, playing outside on a crisp sunny day, the sun blinding off of the powdery white. Light saves me—this I know instinctively, watching the sun mirror off of the snow, off of sand, coming down to pelt my upturned face where I always receive it with exquisite pleasure. But that’s the extent of my weak knowledge. The rest I try to learn. I obsess through online research, hoping to discern why certain groups, like Icelanders, prevail over winter and others do not, grabbing at lifesavers, trying to save myself. The theories are interesting: genetic selection in an isolated breeding marketplace (did the less stalwart Icelanders pack up and move south? Did they not survive to pass on genes?), nutrition, customs, all very interesting, but in many cases inconclusive or perhaps not what I need right now. Still, I grasp with clumsy gloved hands. I buy fish oil supplements since successful winter-overers seem to favor a diet heavy in fish, and fish oil seems to help depression. The supplements feel like a good idea, tangible, a positive step—part of an actual plan to combat a monster. It’s something, at least. I made an effort. Large, golden, heavy in my palm, satisfying on my counter where I forget to take them until they turn rancid. Too late, bent over in pain, belching rotting fish from deep within my gut for hours and wishing someone would save me.

 

SAD creeps up subtly. A rainy day or two in late autumn, then the time changes, throwing you into a panic. Now it is dark when you get up. Your eyes refuse to open. You are late to work. Again. You know that the alarm clock is not a suggestion. But you are tired, lethargic, heavy, and thick, your brain slowed in its molasses sludge. You throw on whatever is clean. Walking the dog seems like an epic climb, the drive to work makes you incredibly sad.  Your friend asks you to lunch, but you refuse. You do pretty well, but the toll is hard. Each day you grow more tired. You stare at stacks of papers that have built up since summer. You start to organize them, but it feels impossible. They lose their relationship to each other and there is too much of everything all over: phones are too jarring, and they compete with your loud colleagues and clients. The projects are like Mount Everest, but you have no goddamn Sherpa to carry your stuff and usher you to the top.

By January you have put on a few pounds, and you look anxiously out the window on cloudy days. Walking through sludge, thinking through water, feet in molasses, the gray blob, “SAD” is your personal escort. To you he looks as cute as he sounds. He is your only friend who understands what you want. And what you want is for the world to go away and leave you alone.  You want to sleep. You want to hide. You want to hibernate like a bear.

There is a theory, that instead of being a malfunction, that SAD served an evolutionary purpose. What if in primitive times it was a benefit to hunker down in the cave wrapped in furs, stuffing high-caloric food into your mouth and sleeping until the spring thaw? Maybe like other mammals, there is a seasonality to our reproductive cycles. It would seem better for babies to be born during seasons of temperate weather and bountiful food, ensuring continuation of the genetic line. I like that idea. You can’t argue with Mother Nature. You aren’t crazy or deficient or weak if you are exercising an evolutionary benefit. However, in our plugged-in, warp speed culture, the traits that served my ancestor in her freezing Alpine village and me in modern life don’t work out so well.

 

Seasonal depression differs from its mother—clinical depression, in certain significant ways. While SAD brings on a craving for carbohydrates often resulting in weight gain, clinical depression may result in weight loss and isn’t strictly seasonal. And even within seasonal depression lies another subset, another layer beneath the world called normal. These atypical sufferers have chemical imbalances caused by the close bright light and heat of spring and summer. Sunlight for them triggers not the slow sludge of the winter sufferer but a manic anxiety that is a twisted mirror image of winter depression. Is seasonal depression then a bipolar disorder broken in half and parceled out to different sufferers at opposite times of year? How alike are we all and yet how different. Still, their bright-light disorder also ends with the flip of Mother Nature’s switch. It too can likely be tied to light, biology, and chemicals—things that come and go based on the natural world, a set course with defined time limits in which the sufferer is suddenly propelled back upon the shores of sanity each and every year.

Why the distinction? Why this need to distance ourselves from the truly sick? Because we cling to whatever life raft we can. You can’t easily spot the millions suffering seasonal depression. Lucky for us, unlike more outwardly struggling mentally ill people, we can distance ourselves from a severe mental illness if we want to or need to in order to cloak ourselves in social respectability. We are forced then to live two lives: one above, one below; one as normal, one as sick; half the year well, and half the year in hell. If we can “pass” as normal all year round through strategy, subterfuge, and muscling on through by grit and pain, should we? What are the ramifications if we admit our disorder?