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Last winter, A.S.—a 26-year-old from Minnesota who asked to go by her initials to protect her privacy while job searching—was terrified of seasonal affective disorder (SAD). No stranger to seasonal depression during Minnesota’s cold, dark, snowy winters, A.S. worried that pandemic isolation would only make the problem worse. She planned a regimen of prescribed antidepressants, light therapy and exercise, then hunkered down and tried to relax through the winter. To her pleasant surprise, it mostly worked.
This year, however, she hasn’t been so lucky. Since daylight saving time hit, “it has been so awful,” she says. “None of my tools have been working the way that they used to.”
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Like the virus itself, pandemic-related stress and trauma haven’t gone anywhere—but now it feels like the world is moving on and everything is supposed to be “normal” when it’s not, she says. Between that and her usual predisposition to SAD, her mental health is going through the ringer.
Luana Marques, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, says she’s seeing similar trends among her patients. If last year’s primary challenge was isolation, this year’s is uncertainty, Marques says. As the pandemic drags on and new variants emerge, many people are afraid of what that could mean for the winter ahead—especially when, post-vaccine rollout, they’d envisioned spending the season around friends and family. That’s colliding in an unfortunate way with SAD, which is defined as depression that follows a seasonal pattern for at least two consecutive years.
“There’s a lot of anticipatory anxiety,” Marques says. “What is [this winter] going to look like?”
Rates of depression and anxiety have been elevated in the U.S. since the pandemic began. As of April 2021, about 33% of U.S. adults reported symptoms of depression, according to a study recently published in the Lancet Regional Health. In a 2019 study, about 19% of U.S. adults said they’d felt…
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Source : time
