If winter makes you eat too much pasta, sleep late, take daily naps, yell at everyone around you and feel like hiding from the world, you might have SAD. Seasonal Affective Disorder turns up about this time every year. SAD usually starts when the days get shorter in October or November and turns into pervasive fatigue by late December and January. Anxiety, irritability, inability to concentrate and weight gain round out the symptoms that strike people who live at some distance north or south of the equator.

It was called “the winter blues” before it became a recognized disorder in the 1980s. Now, medical and mental health professionals recognize it as very real depression, sometimes accompanied by decreased sexual interest, hopelessness, social withdrawal and even suicidal thoughts. Though children can have SAD, it usually begins to occur in our 20s and appears every year in fall and winter, especially in people who have a relative with clinical depression, bipolar disorder or alcoholism. More women get SAD than men. A few, rare people experience a type of SAD with opposite symptoms during summer months.

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