Harris Jensen tells the story about seasonal depression treatment...

Light Therapy Brings Back That Spring In Your Step!  Lamps At The Light Center In Fort Collins Provide The Required Full Spectrum Light

by Harris Jensen, MD
Psychiatrist, Fort Collins, Colorado
Editor, Gooddayjournal.com

Key Words: Harris Jensen, seasonal depression, light therapy, full spectrum light therapy.

We’ve fallen in love with lots of sun in Colorado.  More than 300 sunny days a year see us flocking to the mountains to ski or hike or what have you...and we get a little grumpy when we lose some of that light in the fall and winter as the sun sails lower in the sky.
At least one in ten of us feel that way, anyway.
Experts call it seasonal affective disorder or syndrome, but really we just miss our bath of summer sun, all 10,000 lux (or units) of full spectrum light warming our skin and our emotional brain.  
The winter blues start with low energy.  You miss that spring in your step.  You find yourself sleeping more, maybe nine hours instead of eight, and still you feel tired on your to class or work...and getting through your day.  It’s harder to focus, more of an effort to stay interested...in what you know you enjoy.
Your “get up and go just got up and left”, thanks to not enough sun.  There’s too much of the sleep hormone melatonin in your head, according to one theory.  
About 10,000 units, or lux, of light, is needed to reduce the release of the melatonin from the pineal gland deep in your brain.  The sun’s light hits the back of your eye and creates an electric signal in the 12 layers of cells in the retina, that rockets at 100 feet per second down specialized highways of nerves called the retinohypothalamic tract and suprachiasmatic nucleus, before it reaches the pineal gland.  Full spectrum lamps, available at The Light Center in Fort Collins, CO, provide just this kind of light, reversing this "seasonal depression."
But come fall, it “ain’t happening” with full spectrum light from the sun.  The earth is tilted away from the sun and much less that 10,000 units of light hit the earth, perhaps 8,000 lux or 6,000 lux make it through a much deeper path through the earth’s atmosphere at northern latitudes, filtering out some wavelengths of light.
Not enough sun, then not enough brakes on release of melatonin, and it’s sleepy time...  
All day.
Even in summer, if you work inside too much.
That can spell trouble for some people.  
The impact of sinking energy and mood can be devastating.  Unless they are handing out grades in school, you have to work to get them and that means competition.  And you can’t compete with a sleepy brain.  People out working know customers don’t hand out grades, you have to hustle to earn them.  Hard to hustle with a sleepy brain.
People dieting are especially miffed.  The low light jacks up their appetite for carbohydrates.
Some sufferers are in for a real shock: they sink into severe depression.  Seasonal depression is required to occur for at least two winters in a row, and  it’s more common than most people think.
In winter, depression strikes about 1.5% of people in Florida and 9% of people in the northern U.S. latitudes, according to an article in Wikipedia, quoting the researcher Norman Rosenthal.  Similar statistics are quoted on the web at Mayo Clinic.com and WebMD, as well as in studies found by the search engine Googlescholar.   Higher rates of depression are found in Alaska and Finland.
I find rates of seasonal depression are just what the experts predict: about one in ten to one in twenty of my patients report feeling more depressed in winter than summer.
Symptoms of depression are well known: feelings of emptiness or sadness or irritability, excessive sleep, drops in motivation and concentration, some even feel suicidal and can’t point to a reason why.  There is no personal conflict or loss to identify.
How perplexing!
And dangerous.  If depression gets this advanced, it’s smart to seek out your physician and rule out thyroid problems or anemia with blood tests.
But the remedy is not far away...researchers note seasonal depression can be treated with medication or bright, full spectrum light.  Psychiatrists can be sought out for help in this effort. Correcting brain problems is their expertise.  Ten thousand bright, beaming lux of light, delivered early in the day, can start to lift a person’s energy and mood within a day or two.  Occasionally medication is needed to boost the response.
Some people need the light before 6 am to mimic the summer sun, some don’t.
Some need 30 minutes and most need between 30 and 60 minutes per day.  I’ve known several people who have used bright light all  day at work, getting 4-8 hours per day, to turn around a depression that wasn’t responding well to medication.
Strange, but true, light is a good treatment for the brain.  
The main side effect is headaches, but using more brief episodes of light therapy can minimize this problem.
What holds most people back is convenience.  I’m supposed to sit in front of lamp for how long?
Just sit it on your breakfast table and turn it on and eat your cereal with it in the morning.  Your brain can’t store much energy so it needs that cereal as well as that light.  Glance occasionally into the light every minute or two, and have something to read after you’ve finished your cereal.  Put in your 30 minutes of light therapy.
To amplify the effect of the lamp, now go out and walk or jog sometime during the day.  Vigorous exercise activates 33 genes in your brain including ones for a hormone that activates growth of new nerves in your memory center.  You want to remember what a good time your having don’t you?
If you don’t feel like caring for yourself this much, then maybe a medication isn’t out of line.  Your brain is something you don’t want to waste.  Untreated depression allows that memory center, the hippocampus, to shrink about 1% per year.  According to the World Health Organization,  depression is one of the leading causes of disability around the world.
But what does a lamp cost?
Costs range from about $190 on up, with bulbs lasting about 10 years on some models.  The bottom line: using a lamp for 1,800 days over ten years, or about 900 hours, will cost you about 25 cents a day.
In my ten years as a psychiatrist, working in the “northern climes” of Minnesota (can we say dark and cloudy winters with no mountains?) and Colorado, I’ve had about 150 patients try full spectrum lamps for seasonal depression.  They worked in about  120 people.  Only one person told me it quit working.  
The bulb burnt out.

The Light Center In Fort Collins has a special on these lamps, with costs competitive with those available on the Internet.  These lamps are by Verilux, a well known manufacturer, who guarantees the full spectrum lighting.  My patients have been satisfied with Verilux lamps.
Several people told me their lamps had a bonus green benefit: household plants enjoyed them.  
There is one other option for treatment of seasonal depression I haven’t seen studied in the medical literature.  Going to Mexico for the winter.  That, however, would run you  more than 25 cents a day.

(Harris Jensen, MD, has been practicing psychiatry in private practice in Fort Collins, Colorado, since 1996. He edits an online magazine, The Good Day Journal, which features articles on the outdoors and on improving health using evidence based methods, whether traditional or alternative.  You can write him at editor@gooddayjournal.com.)