Don’t be surprised when some of your friends seem to be grumpy or irritable these past few days. We are now on the tail-end of the four-month long winter season. From the months of November to February, the days are shorter and colder, and the nights longer and darker. As the climate changes, many people actually tend to feel gloomy and miserable. Such mood disorder is known as winter depression, or Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

Based on statistics released by the SAD Association, 500,000 people in the United Kingdom had experienced some form of winter depression, while doctors have estimated that 20% of the population, or almost 2 million people are affected by the disorder in Sweden. Norman E. Rosenthal is the US doctor who coined the term SAD in 1984. Winter depression has a sound medical basis that involves changes in the body’s mood centers brought on by shorter dayligh...

I think most people are aware of WINTER Seasonal Affective Disorder which causes depression during the winter months when the skies are grey much of the time, but how many are aware some people get severely depressed during hot, summer weather, the kind of weather that MOST people call "beautiful"?

Yes. It’s much less common than the winter SAD and the symptoms are usually the opposite. Winter depressions usually involve increased appetite, weight gain, lethargy, excessive fatigue and sleeping much more than usual. Insomnia, decreased appetite, weight loss, agitation and anxiety are usually seen in recurrent summer depressions. The causes of summer depressions are more obscure than that of winter ones. Some researchers believe that some peo...

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