A postcard I made to show all my friends so they think I’ve actually done something interesting this summer.

Summertime Seasonal Affective Disorder Is A Thing

It is! I kind of wish someone had told me that!

Hanna Brooks Olsen
Aug 8, 2017 · 7 min read

One of the best (?) parts about living with mental illness is that you may find yourself constantly wondering if something is A Thing or if it’s just you. I don’t know, maybe neurotypicals do this, too, but I suspect it’s a lot worse when you’re getting back into bed at 2p because you had a thought that was so ruthlessly sad you needed to lay down about it.

Anyway, recently I Googled “why am I sad all summer” and Dr. Internet warmly informed be that my ~Summer Bummer~ was, in fact, a thing.

wut.

If you’ve always assumed that winter is the only season that makes people get all weepy, you’re forgiven. Seasonal Affective Disorder (or SAD, because oh, we have fun!) is most often associated with the long, dark days of winter—which are pretty long in Seattle, where I live. During December, we get just about 8.5 hours of daylight. So yeah, it’s kind of rough.

Most pop psychologists (and by that I mean “people who make Facebook memes that will annoy you into feeling better”) ascribe the winter SADs to a lack of vitamin D, a lack of physical activity, circadian rhythm disturbances, holiday stress, and catch-all wintery blues. They’re not entirely incorrect; data show that these things do all contribute, and there’s even a marked regional difference. An editorial submitted to the American Psychiatric Association notes that “seasonal affective disorder increases in prevalence with increasing distance from the equator.”

Seasonal affective disorder has been a bit vexing to mental health professionals, though; initially defined as its own special kind of Boo Hoo, the DSM-V re-classified SAD as a specific adaptation of your Regural Ol’ Clinical Depression / Garden Variety Bipolar. Rather than a separate way for a brain to misfire, the seasons appear to be a smaller piece of the world’s most unfortunate and frustrating puzzle.

Regardless of the season in which you are affected, SAD is typically diagnosed when a patient exhibits (per the Mayo Clinic) the following symptoms “for at least the last two years”:

Depression that begins during a specific season every year

Depression that ends during a specific season every year

No episodes of depression during the season in which you experience a normal mood

Many more seasons of depression than seasons without depression over the lifetime of your illness

As I’ve written about before, Facebook’s On This Day feature can be super-helpful at reminding you that yes, this is definitely cyclical. So in addition to showing you how unfortunately you dressed in college, this particular Facebook took can also help you track to see if you always feel like this in the summertime, or if this is kind of a new development.

The aforementioned editorial, by the way, also recommended changing the definition to ensure that SAD was less centered around winter-worsening depression, stating that “aside from patients with clear diagnostic criteria for seasonal affective disorder, many patients, both those with mood disorders and those with other conditions, show seasonal variations in symptoms. Some worsen in summer; others in winter.”

“Thus,” the authors write, “it would be useful to provide the modifiers ‘with winter worsening’ and ‘with summer worsening’ for patients with any axis I condition (other than seasonal affective disorder) that worsens in the corresponding season.”

How you know you’re SAD.

However, they’re not quite ready to make the Summer Bummer its own thing just yet.

“Although a summer form of seasonal affective disorder has been described, it has not been sufficiently well studied to warrant a diagnostic category of its own at this time.”

Rude. It’s like that Lana Del Rey song isn’t even a part of the official body of evidence or something. I would invite these psychiatrists over to my place to watch me pad back and force trying to unclench my jaw while internally worrying about how I’ll never be able to work again and also sighing deeply at the thought of putting on real pants but that would require human interaction.

The symptoms of summer SAD are a little different, I found out, than those of the “winter blues.” A paper published in Depression Research and Treatment in 2015 noted that “in addition to irritability, symptoms of the less frequently occurring summer seasonal pattern disorder center on poor appetite with associated weight loss, insomnia, agitation, restlessness, anxiety, and even episodes of violent behavior.”

YIKES.

Anyway, according to my friend WebMD, summertime depression isn’t always a summertime SAD, though—sometimes people who never experience depression in the entire rest of their lives get sad because of the summer.

Sometimes it’s because it’s harder to sleep during disrupted days. Sometimes it’s because summer is fucking expensive (and vacations are stressful even though that’s literally the opposite of what they’re supposed to be). Sometimes it’s because the sun can actually feel damaging to your body.

And sometimes it’s because—yes really—our fear of missing out on those Super Fun Beach Days makes us feel like we’re doing a bad job living our Best Lives (TM).

That last bit is particularly salient for those of us who live, again, in a region where it’s often dark and frequently rainy; the crushing guilt of being indoors doing something awful like working instead of YOLOing on Snapchat with the cool teens with their donut-shaped flotation devices (hi, I’m one thousand years old) can make us feel even sadder.

Depression Courtesy of FOMO. What a world we live in.

Another potential cause of the Summer Bummer is your birth month. In addition to being like, so fiery or controlling or mercurial because of your ~*~sun sign~*~ (I have no clue which signs are which so don’t @ me with astrology), the time of year you were born may also be a determining factor in your reaction to the seasons.

A piece in Smithsonian reads:

Mice with brain chemistry consistent with that of a depressed human have been found to behave in certain ways. The forced swim test, for instance, is often employed to try out the effectiveness of antidepressant drugs. Scientists put mice into a pool of water and measure how much time they spend trying to escape versus just floating passively. Mice can float safely without much effort, but depressed mice, the theory holds, will more quickly lose hope of escape and simply float in despair. The Vanderbilt team ran this test with their mice, and the winter-born brood was quicker to float.

Those poor fucking mice.

The researchers found that mice born in the winter tested higher for depression metrics in numerous tests and even in the face of variables.

“These birth season impacts lasted into adulthood for the mice,” according to the Smithsonian article, “suggesting that the imprint of seasonal light on developing brains can stay with us even as we move around to different environments.”

Mr. Autumn Man: Potentially a Summer SAD sufferer?

Now here’s the part where you feel bad about making fun of all your friends posting Yay It’s Almost Fall memes: Changing seasons can be one of the best treatments and many people find that the shift from summer (expensive, chaotic, requiring smaller items of clothing, high expectations) to autumn (covered limbs, warm beverages, indoorsy stuff) to be extremely comforting.

Just as many people dread the holidays or the end of summer, folks who get summertime sad (or summertime SAD) dread the long days and hot nights and, on the contrary, relish the chilly air

.Of course, not every basic witch who’s excited to don a big scarf and mainline salted caramel mochas (which are ten thousand times better than the PSL and come out the same month and I don’t know where the thinkpieces about that critical matter are) is experiencing summertime depression.

Some members of the Church of Autumnal Trappings just like decorative gourds and cozy textiles. And that’s fine. Let’s make this the year we’re fucking fine with that.

Anyway, for a lot of people, feeling shitty in the summer can come as a surprise. It’s a season that is not only supposed to be fun, it’s a season that’s supposed to be the cure for any kind of seasonal depression you might have. Winter = sad. Summer = YAY! Right?

So why did you spend the Fourth of July home by yourself looped on Xanax? And why do you dread the weekends, with their socializing and their events that require you to shower and try to look presentable?

Summer depression is real as hell—but if you’ve never heard of it, don’t feel like it’s because you somehow missed a piece of common knowledge. Though there are a not-insignificant number of articles about summer SAD, I had to do some deep Googling to find them, and many of them were written for the sole purpose of capturing search hits, which all but ensures that they won’t come up if you’re not looking.

And candidly, I pitched a piece on summer depression to numerous outlets and was rejected across the board because it was “well-covered territory” or “not timely” or “we’re going to pass on this thoughtful pitch,” which means a lot of media-types either don’t think it’s A Thing or don’t think it’s A Thing People Will Share On Social Media.

Regardless, if you’ve been ignoring text messages and “forgetting” to shower and saying yes to staying in more, it’s not because you’re an aberration or because you’re Bad at Summer. Feeling like garbage during the hot months is not particularly unusual, nor is it just you.

Summer depression is very much A Thing and I just wanted you to know that, because I had no idea.

Hanna Brooks Olsen

Written by

I wrote that one thing you didn’t really agree with. Interests include progressive policy, minor league baseball, and Oxford commas. Curious to a fault.

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