About Seasonal Affective Disorder: Information On Seasonal Affective Disorder

Read about the background of seasonal affective disorder and the causes of it. Depression not only affects the person who is going through it, but also everyone around them, including friends, family, loved ones, spouses, and children.

Causes for the disorder

Seasonal Affective Disorder' also known in short as SAD' is a mood disorder caused mainly during periods of winter (and less frequently in the summer)' where you can observe symptoms of depression and misery in a person who has normal mental health during most parts of the year. This disorder would repeatedly be caused year after year with the changes in the seasons.

But what exactly causes this kind of mental or mood disorder is what anybody would want to know. This article provides the right answer for this question' where it aims to explain the different causes of Seasonal Affective Disorder.

After all the studies and researches' the specific cause of SAD still remains unknown. However' they say that just as water' the daylight / sunlight too is an essential to the humans. They also say that exposure to the daylight / sunlight is what helps humans to be strong and healthy. So as the winter season comes in' there would be shorter hours of daylight and longer hours of darkness' and this affects human behavior.

As experts say' sunlight helps humans in the production of some key hormones' and it is believed that with the shortfall of daylight during the winters' this hormone production would be affected' which eventually leads to weakness of spirit and depression. This is how SAD comes about. Three elements could be identified in SAD patients. They are

Serotonin

Serotonin is a key hormone in the brain. When a person is exposed to sunlight/ daylight' his/ her serotonin production goes up. So with the winter season coming in' one would experience longer shifts of darkness thus reducing the production of serotonin and lack of serotonin causes depression.

Melatonin

Melatonin is also a key hormone in the brain' which is linked to sleep. When days are shorter or when nights are longer' the body produces greater amounts of melatonin' and this could cause sleepiness and lethargy in a person.