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It's 30 years since the term seasonal affective disorder (SAD) was first used to describe winter depression. Is it overused today?
In 1984 psychiatrist Norman Rosenthal first used a term that changed the way people thought about winter.
Seasonal affective disorder describes a type of depression with a seasonal pattern, usually occurring during winter. A lack of light is thought to affect the part of the brain that rules sleep, appetite, sex drive, mood and activity levels. Patients experience lethargy and a craving for sugary snacks.
Rosenthal included the term in a paper he co-wrote following a move from the warm climate of Johannesburg in South Africa to the north-eastern US, with its more severe winters.
"It took about three years of seeing the winters alternating with the summers," Rosenthal, who lectures at Georgetown University in Washington, says. "It was a sort of given that people were grouchy in the winter, not so happy."
But the work of Rosenthal and others established that there was more to it than that for some people. The cultural idea of many people being less happy in winter was not to obscure the fact that for a smaller group of people something more serious was happening. "It becomes a medical thing when it has consequences in people's lives, like not being able to get to work or their quality of life going down the drain," says Rosenthal.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30282261
In 1984 psychiatrist Norman Rosenthal first used a term that changed the way people thought about winter.
Seasonal affective disorder describes a type of depression with a seasonal pattern, usually occurring during winter. A lack of light is thought to affect the part of the brain that rules sleep, appetite, sex drive, mood and activity levels. Patients experience lethargy and a craving for sugary snacks.
Rosenthal included the term in a paper he co-wrote following a move from the warm climate of Johannesburg in South Africa to the north-eastern US, with its more severe winters.
"It took about three years of seeing the winters alternating with the summers," Rosenthal, who lectures at Georgetown University in Washington, says. "It was a sort of given that people were grouchy in the winter, not so happy."
But the work of Rosenthal and others established that there was more to it than that for some people. The cultural idea of many people being less happy in winter was not to obscure the fact that for a smaller group of people something more serious was happening. "It becomes a medical thing when it has consequences in people's lives, like not being able to get to work or their quality of life going down the drain," says Rosenthal.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30282261