In reply to winter has come:
I am f*cking miserable during the winter. I guess you could give it a medical definition and treat it with drugs and what have you, but this isn't the way I think about it. I think the cause of the misery, in my case, is absolutely obvious.
In the summer, I do stuff that I enjoy, most days. I spend time outdoors, going climbing after work, spending time in the sun, go on exciting climbing trips (even if it's just a long day say to Gogarth) and do brilliant routes nearly every week. I'm fit and healthy, and life is generally OK.
In the winter, it's freezing cold, it's dark, it's pissing it down, I've got a cold or something worse about 30% of the time, including the fatigue that lasts for a week or two following each illness. I don't really do anything that's fun to speak of - the odd decent day's bouldering (but most of the outdoor climbing is stuff I've done a hundred times already, often on my own, mostly in a freezing gale on slightly damp rock) is about as good as it gets (I've got a winter sun trip booked this year for the first time, but not being a fan of polished bolted limestone, it's unlikely to be the highlight of my climbing year). Life just is objectively shit in the winter, because it lacks every activity that I enjoy.
I don't really buy the light box thing, except as a placebo. The cause of my winter misery is not about the wavelength of the light hitting my retinas, it's about the total lack of any kind of fulfilling activity - coupled with continual fatigue as my immune system fails to deal with the tumult of viruses in the environment.
On the serotonin issue, it's easy to over-simplify. The evidence that depression is connected to a lack of serotonin is that SSRIs work pretty well. But no one knows why. You can't just increase serotonin any old way to deal with depression (e.g. eating foods that have nutrients that will be converted to serotonin). SSRIs have a very specific action that leaves the molecules bouncing around in the synapses, and for reasons no one understands, this seems to result in better mood (in a statistically above average kind of way). Since I can see plenty of objective reasons for feeling like throwing myself off a cliff, tinkering with the neurochemistry isn't my approach to trying to alleviate it - I would rather make changes to my life so that I can actually spend some time enjoying myself and try to improve my physical health so that those objective reasons themselves are ameliorated, rather than just masking the psychological impact with drugs.
But this is a very personal take on the issue. Many people suffer depression without the same view of objective reasons, and the medicalisation/drug therapy approach is of course the best thing in many cases. My intuition is that as a society, we are rather quick to medicalise misery and treat it with drugs, when that isn't necessarily the only option, nor the best or most honest one.
Food for thought I hope.
Bets wishes,
Jon
Post edited at 23:02