#28 Dark Days and Cosmic SAD-ness

As in Seasonal Affective Disorder ... ness, that is. It's a condition inherent upon certain sun-dependent, sentient beings living on any rotationally-tilted terrestrial planet, located in the "Goldilocks" zone between its star and the cold, deep-space darkness. In any solar-system you might name. Certainly true for Earth. Peoples around its temperate latitudes have resorted to various home-grown nostrums for the winter doldrums over the millennia--Christmas, for one-- to dose the annual ailment ... with varying degrees of success.

Guess what?--for the most part THEY WORK, at least for the suicide rate. Let's get the you-know-what, somehow-ineradicable "urban legend" out of the way first. In the face of hard statistical evidence, on the books for decades, most everybody believes that more people kill themselves during the Christmas holidays than at any other time. The exact opposite is true. For one thing, studies show that suicide ratios take a dip over any and all of our public holidays. For another, they decline most in the month of December. But so pervasive is the myth that a number of years ago, as I remember it, NYC radio stations agreed collectively (for real) to ban Tom Waits' neat-but-down-beat "A Hobo's Christmas" from the airways, for fear of increased self-murder among the homeless. Moreover, completely counter-intuitive is this depressing fact: highest suicide rates are in the spring months. (For a hilarious Onion take on the whole bogus notion, click here.)

So why don't depressed people--especially those with congenital SAD--kill themselves more often during those dark and ever-shorter days between the often angst-ridden Thanksgiving and Christmas. Nobody knows for sure, but here's my theory. Whether happily or reluctantly, families and friends tend to gather together for these holidays, and thus provide a kind of ready-made support for the chronically/clinically depressed among them. But more than that: Who, no matter how down, would want to be mortally to blame for spoiling the festivities? "Mom, Uncle Harry just shot himself under the Christmas tree. Got blood all over the presents." Just doesn't happen. And I guess the statistics show it.

All of this does NOT mean, however, that there aren't about 20% of us Americans--millions of folk--walking the streets during that post-Daylight-Savings-Time period with the worst down-in-the-dumps feelings of the year. And medically/scientifically it has to do with the light-deprivation attendant upon the shorter and shorter days leading up to the Winter Solstice, coming around again, happily, this Monday. (There it is, above, incarnate in the sunset over Stonehenge. Compare the Summer Solstice sunrise scene in MM #5. They seem to be about the same. I wonder why, he mused.)

Now if you've really got SAD bad--about 6% of the U.S. population--you'll need anti-depressants at the very least, and bright-light therapy, in the very worst event. There was a TV news segment some years ago where a severely seasonally-disordered fellow had to sit in front of a light-box one or two hours every day during the winter months to ameliorate his condition. It did. (And I couldn't help be reminded of the Prologue to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which I often taught in rotation with others of the Freshman English novel du jour. There, the basement-bound narrator-protagonist floods himself regularly with thousands of 100-watt bulbs, with power stolen from Con-Ed, in a attempt to cure himself of his own kind of dark depression--a metaphor for a black man attempting to become visible in a white-dominated society.)

Then there are the other 14%-- the ones, like me, who have the milder Subsyndromal Seasonal Affective Disorder (no kidding)--or, to acronymize: SSSAD ... like air escaping from a tire going flat. (more)
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