Lack of Blue Sky Brings on the Blues

Lack of Blue Sky Brings on the Blues


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Ed Yeates ReportingPsychologists say if you're feeling down, lethargic, perhaps even irritable, blame it on the weather. Smog and fog day after day are making people a bit claustrophobic and blue. Some worse than others.

When the weather is like this, we're shrouded in much more than fog. Perhaps it could make us feel better if we could sing the blues. Instead, we just feel the blues.

For people like Rose who has what is called Seasonal Affective Disorder, foggy days - before she found out how to treat the disorder - dragged her to the bottom of the blues barrel.

Rose Eley: "Just feeling very edgy, very depressed. I almost can't even describe how depressed and how lethargic. You feel like you're a bear. You just want to go to sleep for the whole winter."

Rose has learned how to deal with her condition through light therapy and medication. But irritability, a feeling of being closed in, and sleepiness are things we all feel to some degree right now.

And it's normal, according to the experts, because some of the hormones which make us feel better are not being triggered by that bright solar ball in the sky.

Michael Stevens, M.D., Psychiatrist, Valley Mental Health: “This is a stressor for everybody. I heard Mark Eubank the other night use a term - the Indians call these inversions the winter death, which is a dramatic term."

But Dr. Michael Stevens says dramatic it was back then because in the absence of the sun, they didn't have man-made lights to brighten things up.

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