The Seasonal Depression I Thought Was Just Winter

In Gothenburg the winters are specific. The sun departs in late October with a decisiveness that feels personal and does not return in any meaningful way until March, and the intervening months are experienced through a grey light that is not quite darkness and not quite anything else - a perpetual dusk that becomes, if you live in it long enough, simply weather.

I grew up in this and it was normal and I had no comparative reference point that would have let me see what it was doing to me.

By my mid-twenties I had a pattern that I had never described to anyone as a problem because I had always described it to myself as seasonal - I simply had harder winters.

From roughly November to February I was slower, less motivated, sleeping more than in other periods, less interested in things that I was interested in during other months, and carrying a flatness that I managed to function around without anyone around me particularly noticing. The functioning was the thing that prevented the diagnosis for years.

I was not presenting as someone in crisis. I was presenting as someone who was a bit low and would be better in spring, which I consistently was. The spring return was so reliable that it reconfirmed, each year, that this was just a seasonal cycle rather than a condition with a name.

At 26, a GP appointment for something unrelated produced, through a routine set of screening questions, a score on a depression assessment that she took seriously. She asked about patterns and timing and the conversation that followed was the first one in which someone had asked the right questions in the right sequence to produce the right picture.

She diagnosed Seasonal Affective Disorder - a real condition with a specific neurological basis and, critically, specific and effective treatments that I had not been accessing because I had not known I had it. Light therapy, specifically timed, produced a change in the quality of my winters that I am still slightly astonished by.

The first winter after treatment was the first November of my adult life that did not feel like descent. I have lost years of winter to something that was addressable and that I had accepted as personality.