SUNSHINE and warm weather aren't for everyone.
Take 30-year-old Saskia Smith, an illustrator who works part time in the billing department of a legal firm. She spent most of last summer's dog days prone in bed with the velvet drapes in her Mid-City apartment pulled tightly shut.
"Other times of year, I'm basically an upbeat person," Smith says. "But when summer hits, it's like I'm operating on a low battery. Last summer, I had no desire to eat, I lost 15 pounds, I had anxiety attacks and I stopped seeing any of my friends. Even going to the grocery store felt like an impossible task."
Smith, who grew up in Seattle and has lived in New York City and Germany (all areas with notably moody skies), is convinced she has seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. The condition first surfaced after she and her husband moved to Los Angeles almost three years ago. "It's the unrelenting sun day after day after day," she says. "I feel like I'm trapped and there's no relief from it. At my lowest point [last summer] I just wanted to die."
Although most people consider seasonal affective disorder to be a winter ailment brought on by waning sunlight, Smith and others say there's a summer version -- and it packs a wallop as well.
Researchers estimate that about 1% of the population suffer from summer depression, compared with 5% for the winter variety. Although summer depression has been mentioned in ancient writings, as well as in scientific journals sporadically for the last 20 years, the relatively low prevalence in the U.S. has meant it hasn't gotten much serious consideration, says Dr. Thomas Wehr, a Bethesda, Md., psychiatrist and former National Institutes of Mental Health researcher.
"The closer you get to the equator -- countries like India, China and Brazil -- it turns out the condition is quite common. But here a lot of people with summer depression feel isolated," says Wehr, an expert on seasonal affective disorder.
Role of the thyroid
Wehr and NIMH colleagues first became aware of summer SAD when they were studying winter depression in the 1980s. "In the course of our research, we'd regularly get letters from people saying winter depression was interesting but they seemed to have the opposite problem. However, the symptoms were different."
People with winter depression tend to sleep more, have less energy, gain weight and have carbohydrate cravings. Summer depressives tend to be plagued with decreased sleep, weight loss and anxiety.
