Seasonal Affective Disorder: Real or Fake?

Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) has been defined as a disorder that causes a person to have a different mood or state of mind as the seasons change. More specifically, it is a critical illness involving reoccurring episodes of depression in the fall and winter, and normal mood behaviors in the spring and summer. There has been several different studies proving that this illness does exist, but there has also been studies proving that it does not.

In an article I read titled Seasonal Affective Disorder: SAD or Fad? , it discussed how this illness may indeed be something that is flawed. In this article they talked about how a lot of the studies that were performed in earlier years proving this illness was valid, studied people  that were psychiatric patients, rather than being normal healthy individuals. Also, several of the previous studies “did not differentiate the specific ‘seasonal’ diagnoses, or if diagnoses were provided, they did not discuss the specific symptomatology”. It has been shown that there is a lack of literature evidence on the disease as well, which causes a lack of validity and reliability in determining whether or not this is an actual disorder. Like perviously stated, most of the research during these studies were performed on self-selected populations, which swayed the results of these experiments into something they wanted to see. There has also been a problem with diagnostic variance in the SAD literature that has been recorded. The importance to this variability is described as criterion variance which “occurs when there are differences in the criteria that are used to make a certain diagnosis and this is one of the major sources of difficulty with reliability in psychiatric diagnoses”.

I agree with this author in the sense that the data can be invalid if these populations are self selected. If you are controlling and dictating all aspects of an experiment, you will get the results that are desired which defeats the purpose of experimentation. I also agree with the fact that studies should have been performed on patients that did not have other diseases or mental illnesses because symptoms that may have appeared to be ones from Seasonal Affective Disorder could have been symptoms from their mental illness or other previously diagnosed disease. I disagree with this author when he states that all of the studies have been controlled incorrectly. For the sake of his article, he most definitively only used previous experiments that were flawed and chose to omit the studies that did provide valid data which do exist and provide solid evidence. New insight that I have learned from this article is that this illness has not been shown to be demographic, meaning that location does not play a role in this disorder. I found that it was interesting point because a lot of times you would think that people living in warmer climates may have a different outlook on life, versus someone living in Alaska. Though this article stated that this illness was not demographic, it raised interest for me to look into studies that specially focused on how the location can affect how this disorder comes into play.

Unfortunately, researchers have not found evidence that this disorder is clinical, demographic, or relates to family history, but it is still a known fact that this tends to be a major characteristic of our population today.

Nina

14 Comments

  1. Hi Nina,

    Wow, it looks like you’ve done a thorough job analyzing that article! Good work! It was probably difficult to work with considering the scientific vocabulary, but I think you’ve demonstrated your understanding of the content clearly in this post.

    Regarding your point that studies should be performed on people with SAD who don’t have other disorders so that researchers can get a better idea of the symptoms of SAD: a great many disorders are highly comorbid, meaning that there is a greater likelihood that they will surface in patients who already have been diagnosed with one or more other disorders. So, you can be ADD and have SAD and still be a valid subject for analysis; you may not be “ideal,” but then again, few people are.

    Again, fascinating post! I look forward to learning even more in your next post!

    ~Christina K.

  2. Hey Nina!
    This is a really interesting topic that I’ve heard a few things about. An interesting “cure” or help for those who suffer with SAD is to use sit the person under a UV lamp for roughly 15 minutes each day during the winter to help simulate more sunny weather, like what you get in the spring and summer! Weird, right?
    SAD reminds me a lot of what people sometimes call “holiday blues”, like that some people get depressed for various reasons around Christmastime or other holidays in and around December. Also people get sad in January, right after the holidays. Maybe this silly “holiday blues” is actually something bigger, and may be directly related to SAD? I hope researchers continue to dwell on this topic because I think it’s interesting. Thanks for the awesome post!
    -Katie

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