Light is powerful and I need a lot
of it. For many years I thought I had a
tendency toward depression. It began in
adolescence and never completely abated.
Over the next several decades it returned, the predictable sequel to
other emotional events. Growing up in
the San Francisco Bay Area I’d lived with overcast skies almost year round. Then there was the fog. Forget Sandburg’s “little cat feet.” [1]
Fog rolls over you in huge, lumbering bales.
Bay Area natives would often say that it
“burns off,” by noon; true, but then it returned like a damp shroud in
evening. I wakened to it, drove through
it, went to sleep with it. I walked in
it and drank in it. Forget the smoky
atmosphere of 1940s black and white spy movies or the romantic nineteenth-century
London of Sherlock Holmes. For me, fog
turned out to be a downer.
My susceptibility to depression is
partially inherited. My mother
characterized her own moodiness as bi-polar disorder. I’m not sure that was true, although one of
her nephews was diagnosed with schizophrenia and ultimately committed suicide. My emotional depression was incomparably
milder, but it was persistent. In my
twenties and thirties it was just endless apologies to friends for being “down,“
short-term counseling in really rough periods.
By my fifties, some mild meds were in order. Then I moved to Michigan. Here the natives grouse about the grayness of
winter. Worse than the cold, they say,
as they pack for Florida.
The Midwest seasons helped,
however. In summer, it seemed I had no
problem. Even the warm nighttime
stillness was pleasurable. At least half
the year was pretty good. You had time
to prepare for the oncoming gloom. In
the early years I’ve lived in Michigan, the 1990s, we seemed to have some
winters with heavy snowstorms---snow days for school, the sound of sledding on
nearby hills in bright sun. So much snow
that even the depressives were distracted. In
between blizzards, I was still struggling, experimenting
with medication and boring my friends with symptoms. Our winters grew milder, warmer, and grayer.
In a 2009 essay in New York Times, Olivia Judson surveys the applications of chronotherapy (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/22/enter-the-chronotherapists/ ) Her notes reference an array of studies on the relationships between circadian rhythms and obesity, cancer, hormones, and psychiatric disorders. That last one got me. By now, “seasonal affective disorder” had been in the news for nearly two decades. Following my circadian rhythms might be good for my health, but what good would it do to become a healthy depressive? I began to read about emotional calendars. And that’s how I found chronotherapy, or as they say online, the "manipulations of biological rhythms and sleep” in order to adjust the effects of light and melatonin.
Columbia University
seems to be a nexus for the light people.
Its Center for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms offers chronotherapeutics
---“a novel set of biological rhythm correction procedures.” The procedures are used not only to establish
normal sleep patterns, but also to “relieve winter depression (seasonal
affective disorder, or SAD, or the milder winter doldrums or winter blues)” and
“alleviate symptoms of unipolar and bipolar depression, whether or not the depression
is seasonal.” (http://columbiapsychiatry.org/clinicalservices/light-treatment-center). Head of the Center, Dr. Michael Terman, Professor
of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry at Columbia, is also
president of the international Center for Environmental Therapeutics (http://www.cet.org/). My problem is global. Latitudinally challenged
confreres live across a band from 45 to 60 degrees North--- France; northern
Italy; the Balkans, Ukraine; Kazakhstan; Uzbekistan; China; Mongolia; HokkaidÅ,
Japan; Ontario, Canada. I feel a bond with fellow American sufferers in the
Pacific Northwest and New England. I’ve woken up late, you might say, to this
interest. Groping intuitively over many
years, in the dark, you might say, I discovered light. No wonder the little Asian lamp was
powerful.
That’s how I got my light box. It’s called a “Day-Light.” It comes from "Uplift
Technologies." No surprise; it's
made in Nova Scotia, Canada---home of fellow sufferers at 43 degrees North. Its package alerted me that “Day-Lights"
are “innovative light supply systems and are not listed medical devices in the
USA." Well, after some five decades
of medically approved gambits, I am ready.
I sit at an arms-length distance of my “10,000LUX Bright Light” for a
treatment time of 20 to 30 minutes in the morning.
This year I've begun the light box early---the last week in October, before we went off daylight savings time. Why wait until psychosis sets in? An eerie, gray light comes through the clouds, watery and sunless. At the ends of the tree branches the last leaves twist in air, amazingly still attached. Their spinning silhouettes combine fragility with tenacity, a metaphor for my years of struggle.
Read more essays at http://eastvillagemagazine.org/
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