Here's What My Seasonal Affective Disorder Is Teaching Me This Year

My Seasonal Affective Disorder is precious to me because it is a reminder of our shared vulnerability to behavioral health disorders. The experience is inconsistent from year to year, and it has been many years since I have encountered the type of consuming affective symptoms that are impacting me now.

The most remarkable aspect of my experience is realizing how difficult it is to slow down or change expectations for my own self-presentation and productivity. Even though I believe that we should carry no stigma when it comes to behavioral health disorders, I continue to function as though these symptoms are something that I should be capable of muscling through. Our culture holds the expectation of constant productivity in an inconstant world, and I have integrated that expectation into my sense of self.

Depressive illnesses are not perceptual, they are physical. The experience is one of crushing fatigue, jittery anxiety with stomach pain, inability to sleep, lost appetite and daily tears. Life itself remains the same – up and down, good days and bad, but the internal reaction to the same old, same old is crushing. As a psychiatrist, watching my own depression unfold is annoying. I see a cognitive distortion – the catastrophizing of a small error and think, “You are focusing on the negative and blowing this out of proportion.” And yet I feel the experience of that emotion roll through me even as I know that it is irrational and unhelpful. We know that our meta-cognitions are important in treating depression, but you cannot think your way out of it. It feels like being tangled in a net with whose construction and materials you are intimately familiar, but which remains completely inescapable.

There is emphasis on making behavioral health care available and accessible … from me! I write about it all the time. But in my own experience at this moment, the greatest challenge to seeking care is finding time to do so. The intersecting demands of professional life and parenthood, boards, and my own non-negotiable need to have a creative life scarcely allow for sleep. Much like the runner who doesn’t want to stop running and go to physical therapy, I don’t want to stop doing. I fear that stopping might lead to a perception that I was unreliable or unprofessional, and that makes stopping feel risky. Simultaneously I started bright light therapy last week and wonder if it doesn’t need just a little more time to kick in – knowing when things are bad enough that additional resources are needed isn’t obvious.

As a leader, I feel compelled to share my lived experience because I know that it’s common and I want other people to know that, truly, they aren’t alone. This isn’t “I’ve been there” – it’s, “I’m here now, and Lord it’s awful.” I also believe that I will feel better soon – seeking sunlight during an upcoming vacation is an intervention that I’m privileged to have available to me, and it always works. I didn’t do anything wrong, and my parents didn’t do anything wrong to lead to my current symptoms – it just happens. And every day around us all people are working so hard to manage their depression and anxiety and addiction and trauma, and we don’t even know.

So above all, continue to create the world you want to live in - through acts of kindness large and small and by finding ways to make your life sustainable over the long haul. We are all in this together. #bethechange #mentalhealthmatters