Summertime sadness
Anyone else get sunny SAD?
Anyone else suffering from summertime sadness? I’m not talking about being a bit over the current heatwave. Although, there is (bloody) that. What with the dragging horror of constant dehydration, feeling filthy ten minutes after one’s last shower, and the cancellation of everything – transport, school, social gatherings – that is giving the sense of impending apocalypse.
Nor am I talking about the (allegedly) normal: “end of summer anxiety” some nutjobs are already anticipating, it being officially past the solstice. A fellow dog walker lamented on Monday – the 22nd! – that: “The nights are now officially drawing in”. Sister, just move somewhere tropical and have done. Neither am I referring to those few, wonderful souls - Claudia Winkleman, most notably – who admit to detesting summer. Although, she’s right, damn it, in her loathing of the clothes, the food, the activities and the toes.
What I mean is genuine Seasonal Affective Disorder, only a reversal of what is usually understood by the term. My brother, Bim, gets the traditional, short days and lack of light, winter-blues variety. And bloody hideous it is too. By late August, he is in panic mode; by October, sinking. The only way he has found to deal with this is getting outdoors for hardcore exercise. However, I, his sister, experience my natural low from spring to late summer; the state I prefer to adopt: lying in a disconsolate heap.
A piece published in The New York Times a few weeks ago was the first I’ve come across to acknowledge summertime SAD. It cited the psychiatrist who brought us the winter model back in 1984: Dr Norman Rosenthal, of Georgetown University. In 1987, Dr Rosenthal published a study on those experiencing a pattern of low mood between March and October. “Summer SAD is more of an agitated depression,” he argues. “While those with winter SAD tend to oversleep and overeat, summer SAD often shows up with insomnia and lowered appetite.”
I would add migraines, profound lack of energy and isolating irascibility, with a thrum of suicidal ideation, only lacking the get up and go. I’ve never understood the association of the phrase “long, hot summer” with sex and rioting: the Tennessee Williams smouldering followed by a little light looting. Where do these people get their vim, their lust for life? My own summers involve an endless, enervated moroseness that only starts to abate once dark nights set in, at which point I realise I was depressed.
