Seasonal Affective Disorder Impacts 10M Americans. Are You One of Them?

This Sunday, November 3, most of America will be traveling back in time—by an hour. That’s when daylight saving time ends and we set back our clocks, signaling the transition into late fall and winter.

With this changing of the clocks, daylight ends earlier. When this happens, some people may experience emerging feelings of sadness and sluggishness, and fluctuations in weight. If you suffer from these symptoms, you may have seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a type of depression related to changes in the seasons. SAD affects an estimated 10 million Americans, with women four times more likely to be diagnosed with it than men. Fortunately, there are treatments available that have proven effective in treating the disorder.

How does one distinguish between SAD and ordinary sadness? What are the possible treatments? And what do scientists know about the underlying causes of the disorder? For answers to some of those questions, BU Today talked to Sanford Auerbach, MD, a School of Medicine associate professor of neurology and psychiatry and director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Boston Medical Center.

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