Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 8, 1995 TAG: 9508080033
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ARTHUR HIRSCH THE BALTIMORE SUN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
what I'm-a gonna do,|
'cuz there ain't no cure
for the summertime blues.''
- Eddie Cochran
Who would have given Eddie Cochran credit for insight into psychobiology? He recorded that song in 1958, long before anybody heard of seasonal affective disorder - either the winter or summer variety.
Turns out Cochran was onto something. Researchers have been looking into the matter for years and, as it happens, there is a summer version of the apparently more common and more well-known winter depression. It's usually called summer SAD. As far as anyone knows, there is no cure.
``Summer depression is kind of the untold story,'' says Dr. Thomas Wehr, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., which has studied seasonal mood disorders since the early 1980s. Wehr says that when the institute started looking for people who experienced depression in the winter it would also hear from many people who said that this winter blues research is all well and good, ``But what about me?''
They belonged to a group less frequently heard from, people for whom summer is not the carefree spree it's made out to be. For these people, May and June are times of dread. Some summer SAD people have trouble sleeping, lose their appetite and become manic. Others find their symptoms parallel winter depression - they become gloomy, withdrawn and listless.
``I wished everybody would go away,'' says a 75-year-old woman from Bethesda, one of Wehr's first summer SAD patients. ``I would be happy to go off in a corner and read until October.''
Ever since she was a child in upstate New York, summer heat and sun have cast an emotional cloud over her life. She finds it difficult to concentrate, to complete tasks and to work. It's an effort just to make conversation. Decisions about what to cook for dinner seem monumental.
Wehr and Dr. Norman E. Rosenthal, his associate at NIMH, together have seen about 70 patients with summer SAD, roughly one for every five cases of winter depression. The further south you go, the more cases of summer SAD you're apt to find, Rosenthal writes in his 1993 book, ``Winter Blues.''
The seasonal cycles that obviously influence the behavior of animals were mostly ignored in modern medical and psychiatric practice until fairly recently, Rosenthal writes. But studies conducted in Bethesda and Australia, and duplicated elsewhere, have confirmed that winter depression is triggered by longer periods of darkness. The disorder has been treated effectively by exposure to bright artificial light.
Summer SAD is a bit more tricky, apparently brought on by some combination of heat, humidity and possibly the intense, glaring light of summer.
``We're not absolutely sure,'' Wehr says. ``It's very difficult to tease apart the temperature from the light.''
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Rosenthal says one summer SAD patient also found her mood adversely affected by bright sunlight reflected off a heavy snowfall.
The Bethesda woman recalled that one summer her depression was much less severe after she visited her hometown of Ithaca, N.Y., in June and went swimming several times a day in Cayuga Lake. The water temperature probably had not yet reached 70 degrees - much too cool for most swimmers - but she says she found it exhilarating.
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Wehr says that until the 1960s, it was common for psychiatrists to treat depression by immersing their patients in ice water. For summer SAD patients, such treatments as cold showers or spending days in a darkened, air-conditioned room don't seem to have much lasting effect, Rosenthal says.
``The symptoms come right back as soon as they go out and hit that `wall of heat,' as so many call it,'' he says.
Asked about treatments for the depressing effects of summer, Wehr says, ``Aside from moving, certain antidepressant medications sometimes are very helpful.''
by CNB