I used to write a lot about seasonal affective disorder. I used to use this blog as a way to explore a mysterious exhaustion turned depression that continued to overpower my winters, and found it served as a release for me but also that others with similar issues found the blog through google searches for things like “hypersomnia” or “S.A.D.” *see what the Canadian Mental Health Association has to say about SAD here.
I haven’t written much about it anymore, because I have, effectively, not dealt with it this year. Or perhaps a more appropriate thing to say might be that I finally did deal with it. And so this post is less a release for me, and more for any people who might stumble across through google still suffering every year as the days get shorter.
First of all, it is true that just about everyone feels a little bit slower, and a little bit less energized in the wintertime–and that’s perfectly normal. What’s not normal is not being able to get out of bed, sleeping 10 to 12 to 14 hours a night, every night, and still finding it necessary to nap, eventually becoming so overwhelmed and depressed that you don’t get out of bed to make food….those things are not okay.
As I wrote about in previous posts, light therapy can be extremely helpful. Traditional Western doctors and psychiatrists can help set you up with light therapy to manage SAD. For me, though, light therapy was not enough. My psychiatrist wanted to see me on anti-depressants, and while there are times when they are necessary, I was convinced that there was an underlying cause to my illness which was not being addressed, and as it turns out I was right.
So what can I suggest that worked?
1. Get on Vitamin D. If you live in Canada you need it for 6 months of the year, whether you suffer from symptoms or not. Vitamin D is something our body gets from exposure to the sun, which we simply can’t get enough of this far north this time of year. Also, sunscreen/block stops the absorption of Vitamin D soooo if you’re as white as I am, and need sunblock then you should probably take Vitamin D in the summer as well: it’s very important for regulating your melatonin system, which helps you to have a natural sleep schedule. Melatonin also works in conjunction with the seratonin system, and symptoms of depression are related to decreased levels of seratonin.
2. Get on a Vitamin B complex of some kind.
3. Consider going to see a Naturopathic Doctor.
With my naturopath I uncovered a number of food sensitivities that I never knew I had. I started as someone ostensibly with no allergies whatsoever, only to discover that gluten, corn, egg and citrus all powerfully affect my skin, digestive system, and most significantly (for me) my moods. A lot of my friends have expressed that they could not give up foods like that, and would rather stay blissfully ignorant of sensitivities. I have to say, I don’t see a single problem in the world with that: as long as you are blissfully ignorant, I was not. I was miserable and committed to finding a solution, so giving up those foods has not really been a big deal.
We (my naturopath and I) combined this with the use of a homeopathic remedy and acupuncture. Each of these were tailored to my specific symptoms for a very individualized treatment. To those skeptics reading: I feel you, 100%. BUT the diet alone was not enough, in November symptoms were starting to show and somehow they went away. I can only describe it as feeling like my body has achieved an important kind of internal balance (which is, quite precisely, the goal of naturopathic medicine). At the end of the day its the effectiveness of any kind of treatment that counts. Which is to say, I don’t know if I understand how these treatments worked, but even if has just been some kind of placebo affect, I’ll take that over seasonal depression.
In my case, I could not afford to see a practicing naturopath but instead saw a 4th year intern at the Canadian College for Naturopathic Medicine. She has been incredible, compassionate and helpful, and every visit is overseen by a registered ND.
Right, well that’s it. May your winters get warmer and more wonderful. I, for one, can’t even express how great it feels to be able to really enjoy the beauty of Canadian winters wholeheartedly again.
February 8th, 2008
You know why living in Toronto rocks? Because this afternoon I was one of like 60 people to see Hawksley Workman perform songs from his new album, Between the Beautifuls, on MTV Live, a 20 minute walk from my house, for free!
I think Hawksley definitely attracted an audience that the MTV Live group weren’t used to, which laughed tongue-in-cheek at their humour, rather than enjoying it outright, but in anycase it was a blast! And if you go the MTV Live website and look at the Hawksley clips from today’s show you can see Gabe and me sitting there (Gabe in green stripes, and me in many multi-coloured stripes) in the ‘chats with the hosts’. More importantly, you can also check out the performances. All three songs he performed were new, and I particularly liked the 2nd on September Lily.
Also, because I have a test tomorrow, and just saw one of my favourite artists, I am surfing the net very aimlessly. Hawksley is from Huntsville, Ontario, so obviously I went to the Huntsville website. Yes, I’m embarrassed. But I’m glad I did because it made me laugh.
Check out #7 on the FAQ page.
I genuinely hope those available at that number are derided daily with prank phone calls.
February 6th, 2008
I have struggled, as someone raised outside a strictly religious family, but with Christian influence, and having turned from the teachings of the faith with the idea of how to raise my own children. I do not want to bring them up under Christian theology. I do not want them to feel they are inherantly sinful, or somehow incomplete unless they accept a particular belief system, or to fear that they, or their loved ones may end up in hell (all ideas I struggled with as a child).And yet it seems inescapable to me that the young mind be raised with myth.
Our minds, particularly the minds of our children, are deeply structured on narrative–and in that sense whatever is given to them will be taken as myth. And so I shudder at the idea of raising them, in such a consumerist culture with no structural ideas as their myth. And yet even more frightening to me is the idea of sending them to ‘atheist’ or ’secular’ sunday schools (which are now popping up)–because the last thing you need is a child to develop skepticism as their myth.
Rational engagement with ideas and the development of compassion for others through understanding their choices and needs are ideals I would promote–and those are not ideals afforded by any faith (besides Buddhism) any more than they are promoted by modern day atheism which avidly declares religions to be the antithesis of science.
At the end of the day, I feel it is often lost that believing in God, or claiming that there is a God, is only as ludicrous as believing or claiming there is no God. It seems to me, lost on some secular rationalists that admitting agnosticism, in the true sense of the word, is the only “rational” claim.
February 1st, 2008
There is something bizarre, to me, about people who claim to be rational, and open thinkers who beat against the Bible and the Christian faith as if it were some kind of punching bag through which they were supposed to be able to make themselves feel smarter.
The Bible is an extremely ancient collection of written works, parts of it respected for millennia, that cannot be easily dismissed. Are there parts of it which are contradictory, or ludicrous in the light of scientific discoveries? Yes. But if you are a secular rationalist then step back and accept it for what it is–a collection of myths and stories that helped, and continues to help, various peoples and cultures around the world through times of strife and trouble when things seemed to be going so wrong in the world that nothing could make life seem worth living.
Sure, you say. But your point is that people out there take it literally! They take it seriously! Every word, you scream, they believe! And I hear you. It stresses me out too. And I’ll admit that I don’t have an answer to that, but I do have a few things to say.
1. Attempting to repeatedly prove that the arguments behind their faith are hollow will never accomplish anything. Their faith is not filling a rational need in their life. It is filling a deep spiritual one, and to take that from them is simply to open them up to the painful experience of absurdity. Only through the experience of seeing the possibility of living and enjoying a compassionate, fulfilling life outside a Christian faith could their beliefs ever be changed–and you are not working toward that end by stirring bad blood with them.
2. As long as you spend so much of your breath attacking their beliefs you are still attached to, and controlled by the role the faith has played in your own life. To actively reject Christianity, so viscerally, or even so rationally (considering it’s not a rational faith) is to accept it as a tenant to be actively argued against. It is not. It is a faith. Ignore it, if it’s not what you want for yourself.
February 1st, 2008
I am frustrated.
I am angered.
I am experiencing visceral and emotional responses to arguments that strike me as unfair, and hypocritically narrow.
It has always seemed patently ignorant, to me, to pit science against religion, or to purport it to be some important step forward we have taken from religion as we progress as a species.
As if science did not depend on leaps of faith. For science to work we need to trust our ability to perform inductive reasoning. We need to trust the theoretical choices and probability assignments we make. We need to put faith in the choices of educated individuals to hold one theory up over another. And that’s okay. That is how it works. And an argument can most certainly be made for using our competency as a species as evidence for our reasoning abilities, and the reasoning of our trained scientists.
But let us not lose sight of the parallels between choosing to hold science above all else, and to take the word of the theorist and the choice to hold religion above all else in taking the word of the theologians. There are differences, absolutely. But, there are similarities, and to deny that is arrogant and ignorant.
*I ended up here because friends of mine had joined a group about it on that evil social network we all use. And I browsed around this mixture of sometimes rational and compassionate ideals based on mindfulness and wellness yet often arrogant and pigheaded battering of the beliefs of religious others and I got frustrated. Because hypocrisy irritates me. You can be dogmatic, and fundamentalist and myopic if you want–but if you’re going to be then leave others to do the same (at least if you’re going to claim ‘rationality’ as your one of your main motivations and inspirations).
February 1st, 2008
I just finished Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. I had high expectations, I’ll admit. It was recommended to me, in my second year of university, during a heated debate. A few people were trying to dash my naive hopes for progress in humanity by flouting about ideas to do with self-interest and greed etc. etc. and I was grasping at trying to communicate that while I could appreciate those aspects of our humanity I felt that we had evolved the ability to understand these parts of ourselves, their pros and cons, and the possibility of growing away from the damaging ones…or something. And the one individual present who was sympathetic to my underdeveloped ideas pointed me toward this book as a place where these ideas were explored.
Sure enough The Blank Slate is a powerful argument for the reality of Human Nature, and the role it plays in the dark side of what people are capable of, but Pinker makes it clear that he points these things out not to justify them but to encourage us to learn about them so that we can better prevent crime and inhumane acts etc. It’s good. It just often left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It was almost as if while Pinker kept claiming to feel that the exposition of his ideas would mean progress, the connections couldn’t be followed through in his writing. Perhaps because despite all the work he pulled together he was working exclusively through a Western philosophical framework and that seemed to limit his ability to build on human universals he was uncovering.*
All-in-all worth the read though. Another thing I read was The Embodied Mind and it was really wonderful. It was difficult to get through at times, simply because of the density of the material, but left me with a fantastic taste in my mouth. It too was deeply concerned with elements of human nature but was more invested in the experience of rising above it (through Buddhist-esque* meditation etc). Which brings me to a quotation I found in the Blank Slate from The African Queen in which Katherine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”
*There are rough allusions here to something which could be taken as simply deferring to Eastern philosophy with no justification aside from its being ‘exotic’, but that is not what I mean to be doing. There is a sense in which I feel like incorporating some Eastern philosophy will be necessary to dig us out of the moralistic and spiritual hole that secular science has been digging us into. Particularly research in Human Nature is revealing more and more about the impermanence of human life and that our notion of a ’self’ emerges from activity in the body. While someone like Pinker may not mean this as a spiritually defeating idea, for alot of Westerners it has to be–Judaeo-Christianity simply hasn’t prepared us for anything like it. In order to deal with it looking to traditions like Buddhism which deal actively with the impermanence and illusion of the self may be deeply helpful.
January 9th, 2008
For the last few months, Gabe has been complaining from time to time, to anyone who will listen, about the mystery of my pre-sleep energy-surges. And I have to admit, there is a bizarre phenomenon, whereby I am quite often the first person in our house to claim defeat at the end of the day and groggily waddle toward the bathroom to begin the nightly ritual of our house’s toothbrushing parties, but then, as if by magic, as soon as we’re in bed and right before the lights go off I am suddenly completely awake. (Perhaps unfortunately, for him) these are in no way sexual bursts of energy. We’re talking about those moods I get into when I act like a three year old, shooting off incessant questions, or when all else fails and I can’t seem to get attention verbally I just tickle, and tickle, and tickle. Last night the four of us in the house were in Gabe and my room before bed chatting late into the night (presumably because we were bonding with our new roommate) and at about 1am everyone finally climbed back to their beds for sleep and sure enough, as soon as they left I started bouncing about and Gabe looked at my guiltily before admitting, “I feel like I’ve been left with you…” I laughed, painfully hard.
January 9th, 2008
I heard a rumour today that the main reason the University of Toronto converted their full-year introduction to psychology course to a half-year course was that students were doing too well in the second year psychology courses. That’s right. They were simply too well-prepared, thus why not take the (apparently well-performing) foundational course and condense it so that people do worse.
Now, I don’t really know if it’s true. But I know it’s not impossible. After all that’s what bell-curving tests is all about isn’t it? — about maintaining that bell-curve distribution.
And the friend who was telling me this today said, “I mean I know they need to do this kinda thing because you want your mark for UofT to mean something”…and I know what he meant…but I got to thinking…
What if all the foundational courses were brilliant? What if all the intelligent people who were accepted into the University of Toronto were presented with what they needed to achieve at the greatest potential possible? Then maybe sure, everyone who went here would get good marks, but that would just mean that everyone went to a school that was so dedicated to the development of knowledge and education that everyone performed outstandingly.
Instead of what high marks from this kind of place mean now, which is something like: you’ve done well despite our attempts to hold you back; you are one of the elite few on the top end of the bell curve. Well done.
November 8th, 2007
Tonight I am studying for a test in my course on the Psychology of Language, and I’m not convinced it will go well, but what can ya do.
The text book is really bad. It contains information about studies that demonstrate the types of sentences that are most difficult for people to read (convoluted with usage of the passive voice), and uses them everywhere. It’s also full of false claims, bad assumptions, and has the odd spelling error.
I also have complaints about Chomsky. Which is odd, cause generally when I interact with him it’s in books on American policy etc., and I love him. But from time to time I have to deal with his linguistics and I just get all irritated and frustrated and ranty. Yes you beat Skinner and the behaviourists–and for that I love you…but goddamn, what’s the use of a linguistic model with no basis in psychological reality? How can you not even aspire to have your model be tested, potentially falsified and built on? Are you really content just building big towers of hypothetical linguistic theories that depend on everyone going “shhhhhh…don’t listen to the psychologists….they just don’t understand..”???? ARGH! I would love linguistics to be a science, I would. But it’s not anywhere close right now.
My textbook juxtaposes linguistics and psychology by saying that linguistics comes from the tradition of rationalism, while psychology is rooted in the tradition of empiricism and that this is at the root of their disagreements. …as if psychology could really get by without philosophical frameworks (not that it doesn’t try sometimes), and as if anything (including linguistics) can aspire to being a science if it doesn’t function empirically.
Other things that are atrocious:
1. This whole thing about waterboarding…It’s everywhere I look right now. Protesters in the states. Matt Good is writing about it. Jon Stewart is talking about it. The CBC is reporting on it. Seriously people (read: certain American politicians) there’s nothing to debate. There’s no semantic ambiguity. Waterboarding is torture and you are actively using it. That is disgusting. Seriously, it makes me feel rotten and disgusting in the pit of my stomach. Liberty? Human Rights? …fucking hell. BESIDES WHICH, it has been proven that torture does not yeild accurate information. It just yeilds whatever it takes to get the torture to stop. So do you just do it for the kicks? My god we can be sick, sick animals.
2. Canada now allows Drug companies to advertise. Lovely eh? Isn’t that just what you want? We don’t have enough commercialization as it stands, I think it would be fantastic to have drugs advertising directly to people. Cause really you want people to choose their own drugs. Med school doesn’t really make you any more aware of how the body works and how illnesses ought to be remedied. Besides it’s important that a large portion of the income drug companies have get directed into marketing and advertising (over 50% for some companies in the US), because, after all–you wouldn’t want them to redirect that money into research and development….
So, while I’m linguistically ticked off at him, in the spirit of my last two complaints I’d like to direct you to Chomsky’s new book: Failed States. It’s really brilliant. The main premise is that using the standards that America uses to assess states to declare them “failed” and thus justify their involvement in their administration, America itself is a failed state. Well written. Lots of interesting information–like did you know that of all the countries which sent doctors to the region affected by the Tsunami Cuba sent the most government sponsered ones? And that of those something like 47.9% were female? …anyway. I think it’s his strength.
November 7th, 2007
I’m starting to hear rumours that this Ontario referendum hasn’t been well publicized and that a lot of people don’t know what it’s about. Personally I think it’s an important step toward a more representitive government, so I hope people are made aware and vote!
Right now we have the “first past the post” system which means that the representitive with the most votes in a riding gets a seat in government and noone else from that riding does. In theory this makes sense, but imagine the following. Three ridings near one another are each very competitive. One between the Liberals and the Conservatives, and two others between the Liberals and the NDPs. Now imagine that the Liberals win a seat in each riding by a margin of 1%. Hypothetically the first riding votes 51% Liberal and 49% Conservative and the other two ridings are the same proportion except with NDPs. Overall there is a great deal of support for all three parties, and yet only the Liberals would be represented in this system.
The idea with MPP (mixed party proportional?) is that representitives would still be elected from ridings, but there would also be seats designated to parties who did not get enough representitives elected to correspond to their proportion of the popular vote. Result? The percentage of votes a party gets will actually correspond to the percentage of seats they have in government. Cool much?
Anyway, look into it further. Decide what you think, and make sure you vote in the referendum!!
For more information:
The Referendum Website
An article from city news
The Vote for MMP website
September 30th, 2007
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