Travel north of the 35th parallel just about anywhere in the continental Northern Hemisphere, and you’ll find that almost everywhere you go, by this time of year the residents are thoroughly sick of winter. Not long ago, in fact, a Welsh psychologist calculated that January 24 is the most depressing day of the year across the northerly industrialized world. His formula, formally stated as 1/8W + (D – d) 3/8 × TQ M × NA, says that holiday cheer has diminished, the Christmas bills have arrived, New Year’s resolutions have been abandoned, food consumption is up—and the weather is downright rotten.
Some scientists have criticized the formula as a gimmick, but others agree that there’s something to it. Winter in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere, after all, can be a gloomy affair, a months-long season of darkness, cold, and confinement indoors. Not surprisingly, because we are creatures with a memory of thousands of millennia of outdoor life tucked away in our genes, many people react negatively to the season. In many parts of the world, particularly Scandinavia, suicide rates increase during the pent-up winter months; so do rates of alcoholism, divorce, and, abundantly, depression.
In places where cold temperatures and gray skies are more than seasonal, winter brings the blues and worse, even though, at least in theory, people living there should have long since adapted to such conditions. For instance, across the Arctic, native peoples suffer from a mental illness that in one Inuit language is called pibloktoq, literally “snow crazy.” Too much time spent inside an igloo can cause a person susceptible to the malady to exhibit a range of unpleasant behaviors, ranging from excessive anxiety to verbal rage, babbling, a hyperactive version of sleepwalking, and sometimes homicidal behavior.
In more southerly climes, the same phenomenon is called cabin fever, nowhere better portrayed than in Stephen King’s snowbound novel The Shining and the movie Stanley Kubrick made of it, starring a decidedly pibloktoq-crazed Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, the insane guardian of an even more insane alpine hotel. That depiction, of course, is an extreme one. Few people who suffer from what health professionals have branded seasonal affective disorder behave violently. Instead, the acronym SAD is more descriptive of the complex of emotional ailments that come from too much time under cloudy skies.
The ailment is not completely understood, but researchers have determined that it affects more women than men and that it usually manifests itself in adulthood. (Thus children think nothing of playing all day outdoors in the cold, whereas most adults shiver just looking out an icy window.) SAD expresses itself with the onset of late fall and winter, with an upsurge around the holidays—indeed, much holiday stress might be attributable to the weather and not the pressures of family or shopping—and is characterized by all the usual signs of depression: a decline in energy and interest in work or even pleasant activities; withdrawal; increased appetite and weight gain, with the self-loathing that so often comes with the package; lethargy and a tendency to oversleep, sometimes well into the afternoon; and, often, a craving for sweets and starches and all the highs and lows that come from overconsumption of sugar, which is the body’s way of begging for fuel as a way to ward off the cold, even when the afflicted person is indoors for the duration.
Medical researchers have suggested several remedies for SAD, including changes in diet and a program of regular exercise, preferably outdoors. One remedy is that the sufferer simply move someplace where the sun shines more generously—the Sunbelt, Hawaii, Spain. For those who cannot move, the light of the desert and tropics can be brought indoors. A highly effective remedy for SAD is artificial light therapy, using an array of light bulbs whose spectrum closely matches that of natural sunlight. Such lighting was once prohibitively expensive, but now several brands of bulbs are available at the cost of a few dollars apiece.
Most SAD sufferers respond in some degree to light therapy. Still, researchers warn that the ailment is complex, with no single cure working in all instances. Indeed, some unfortunate people are resistant to light treatment altogether, requiring other measures that can include electroconvulsive therapy and prescription medicines.
Not everyone dislikes the gray and wet, of course. Iceland, along with northwestern Scandinavia, is the grayest region in Europe, covered in mist, fog, and cloud 85 percent of the year; even the famed midnight sun is usually smothered in a blanket of moisture-laden, dark clouds. Yet, at least until the financial meltdown that threatens to plunge Iceland into economic Ragnarök, the people there, according to the World Database of Happiness—yes, there really is such a thing—were consistently ranked at the top of the charts. One suspects that their mood would only be dampened, so to speak, by a sunburn, something, it seems, that most of the rest of the world prefers to gray skies.