Word: hellekson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Krabacher suffers from SAD, short for seasonal affective disorder, a syndrome characterized by severe seasonal mood swings. "This is more than the winter blahs," says Psychiatrist Carla Hellekson of Fairbanks. "This is something that needs to be taken care of." Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health began studying and defining the syndrome in the early 1980s; it received formal acceptance this spring, when it was included for the first time in the American Psychiatric Association's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Third Edition). Says NIMH Research Psychiatrist Norman Rosenthal, a pioneer in SAD studies...
...only certainty so far is that light therapy relieves SAD. Sufferers readily pay around $400 for a sun-box, a device containing several fluorescent light tubes that emit the full spectrum of natural light at five to ten times the intensity of indoor lighting. Says Hellekson: "The light you get is about equivalent to standing one inch away from a window on a sunny spring day." Because light seems to affect the body through the eyes and not the skin, tanning therapy doesn't work, Rosenthal points out. Some patients spend from 30 minutes to five hours daily soaking...
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