Living in the Tropics as you do, dear reader, you might not have ever heard of something called Seasonal Affective Disorder — rather appropriately known by its acronym, SAD. SAD happens to people primarily in the northern latitudes when the summer months, with their long, warm days and short nights, turn to the autumn and winter months, which are much colder and darker.
General understanding of SAD is that when it's cold and dark outside, some people become depressed, lethargic and sometimes even suicidal. There are lots of other symptoms of SAD, but those cover the high points. I never quite understood the disorder because I always enjoyed the autumn and winter months much more than summer.
When I lived in the US, the winter months were always my most productive, and I always felt physically and mentally best when the weather was gloomy.
It was when spring began to transition into summer that I started to feel more depressed and found it really hard to get motivated to do anything. I seemed totally out of synch with most people that I knew — and certainly out of synch with people who suffered from SAD.
It wasn't till I moved to Thailand that I began to suspect that I might suffer from, for lack of a better term, a kind of reverse SAD. You see, though Thai people seem to think that there is more than one season here, the tropical environment amounts, when you're somebody like me, to one unending summer.
After my recent trip to the US, and experiencing some truly cold, blustery and dark weather — and feeling great during it — that I began once again to consider the whole SAD diagnosis. What I learned today is proving quite eye-opening.
As I wrote above, lots of people have assumed for a long time that SAD only affects people in the winter months. But since the 1980s there has been research into people who feel just like me and my reverse-SAD self diagnosis. The findings so far show that there are, indeed, people who feel depression when the weather is warm and sunny. Rather than calling it a different type of SAD, the few people researching the phenomenon have begun coming to the conclusion that we summer sufferers are just experiencing SAD in a different season.
I've always been quite a contrary kind of person, so it doesn't really surprise me that I'd suffer from a famous condition in the complete opposite way than the condition is widely understood. That doesn't make it any easier to deal with, but it does give me some hope that maybe there's something I can do about it.
Until I figure that out, I guess I'll try as much as possible to stay out of the sun and in the cool. It may run up my air-con bill, and I'm sure I'll look even paler than I do.
But at least I won't be so SAD.
Sean Vale
Editor
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