Capitalism’s Best-Selling Product: Seasonal Affective Disorder
With the beginning of the darkest and coldest months of the year, especially here in Seattle, we also experience the beginning of the annual epidemic of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). SAD is basically what its acronym advertises, with the DSM-5 categorizing it as a recurring major depressive disorder with a seasonal pattern. For most, the seasonal pattern of SAD begins in fall and continues through the winter. Traits that characterize this disorder are episodes of depression which include experiencing sad mood and low energy, hypersomnia, and increased appetite with carbohydrate cravings.
Let’s think about the context these traits exist in. During colder months, our human bodies are craving more sleep and more food. Many animals are known to hunker down during winter months, filling up on food to store up energy to be able to survive the cold. Considered in this context, do these cravings seem pathological or are they possibly just adaptations to a harsh environment? Let’s look at who SAD primarily impacts. The average age of onset for SAD is between 18-30 years old. What lifestyle transition do we typically make between the ages of 18 and 30? Joining the workforce. We are demanded to crank out 40+ hours a week of production year round. What seems truly pathological is pushing our bodies to work at the same speed they do during the bright, warm summer months during the seasons with freezing temperatures and minimal hours of daylight. We go against our bodies’ natural and healthy cues for slowing down and resting, and sacrifice it in favor of meeting capitalist production quotas.
Women are another group that is heavily impacted by SAD, with women being four times more likely than men to be diagnosed. Through an anti-capitalist lens we can consider the added burden of the second shift for women during this time of year. The second shift describes the reality that women in the workforce are tasked with working a second shift when they return home as they remain in charge of childcare, cleaning, and cooking. Women who are already overworked are then expected to go against their bodies’ signals to slow down, eat, and rest in order to maintain the rhythm capitalism demands.
SAD, Capitalism, & Trauma
The defeated exhaustion of depression can look very similar to the effects of trauma. Our mental health isn’t divided into neat boxes as much as the DSM would like to make us think. Trauma is our body’s reaction to an event that signals to our nervous system that we are unsafe. Let’s look at SAD through a trauma-informed lens to get more information on what might actually be going on. Going against our bodies’ natural signals, such as wanting to eat or rest more during the fall and winter months, creates mistrust between the mind and the body. Our bodies can feel abused when we push them to work past their limits, and neglected when they signal to us that we have reached our limit through making us tired or having body aches. In a capitalist society, we ignore these signals and continue trudging on at our “normal” pace. Avoiding these biological cues can cause unconscious distress that ruptures the relationship between our minds and our bodies as our body feels its needs are not being met, which will cause it to “play dead” and shut down as a way to try to store energy and survive.
How are our bodies supposed to feel safe when so many people are one car accident away from lifelong medical debt? With corporations not being held accountable for providing sick days, parental leave, holiday vacations, healthcare, or childcare, it's no wonder why our bodies feel under constant threat. The fact that there is no physical predator to run or hide from confuses us because we cannot always identify where the feeling of threat is coming from. Therefore, it makes complete sense that it has become common to collapse into hopelessness as we give up trying to fight an invisible enemy.
Capitalism forces us into a corner where we have to decide between allowing the workload to traumatize our systems, or stepping out of the capitalist system but then suffering the consequences of stepping into poverty, which is an unrealistic solution and even more traumatic. It is valid to feel disempowered if our basic human needs are less of a priority than a billionaire’s paycheck.
With SAD, work stress, and fatigue all being so common, it seems obvious that this is a societal problem; that those in power are gaslighting individuals into believing they are the problem so that systems benefiting from their labor won’t have to change. The origin of the word depressed in Latin means “the act of pressing down; state of being pressed down.” In the 14th century the meaning of the word changed to mean “put down by force; conquer.” This clearly reflects the changes in society, now filthy with colonization and attempts at domination. Even thinking back to the Great Depression of the 1930’s, which shows evidence of capitalism and depression being intertwined. From a trauma-informed, anti-capitalist lens, SAD can easily be conceptualized as the outcome of a patriarchal capitalist society pressing us down into bite size pieces before conquering us. Resting is demonized, voicing the need to rest is pathologized, and imagining political change that would allow our main purpose in life to be something other than producing wealth for others who already have more than us is deemed radical.
An anti-capitalist perspective on SAD would view it’s experience as a normal reaction to the abnormal environment of late stage capitalism. It would mean that your body is doing what it is supposed to by being in tune with the changing of the seasons, adjusting your appetite and sleep habits to match what keeps your body warm and safe.
So, What Now?
Often for SAD treatment, the same band-aid solutions are offered again and again: take Vitamin D supplements, exercise more, eat healthier, psychotherapy using CBT, and travel to warmer places for the winter months. Therefore, my suggestion to anyone reading this who experiences SAD is to buy a plane ticket to somewhere on the equator, stay at a five-star hotel from September through February where you can do yoga with Gwenyth Paltrow, eat nothing but salad bowls, and think positively about your great new life! Surely these things that mental health professionals promote are accessible to everybody, or else why would they be preaching them as the cure to these “winter blues?” Do they not sound realistic to you? Are these interventions as a whole only affordable for the upper class, making them unattainable for those with the highest workload, longest work hours, and the highest risk of developing mental health issues?
Interventions I do recommend are intentionally taking time to genuinely rest. Yes, this means you might have to give up your 4 hour nightly scroll through TikTok, but giving our bodies space to recover after maintaining our workload through this season is imperative to keeping us sane. In fact, cutting back on screen time, especially regarding social media, can actually be extremely beneficial because engaging with these forms of technology activates our sympathetic nervous system and keeps us in a constant state of arousal. What we think may be unwinding is actually twisting the knife of exhaustion deeper into our bones and blocking us from having time to recover. Prioritizing our sleep is also a practice available to everyone. Listening to what our bodies tell us and not shaming them for craving naps or wanting to go to bed at 8 p.m. on a Friday night is a great way to build back trust with our bodies.
Long-term solutions I suggest to people experiencing SAD traits are burning down the patriarchy by dismantling the oppressive capitalist system that put our bodies through this trauma in the first place. Consider being active in your local politics by voting in federal and local elections, calling out unhealthy workplace environments that exploit our human right to eat and sleep, and mentally dismantling the internalized white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy in our own heads so that we stop shaming ourselves and others for trying to survive in a world attempting to turn our human existence into dollars. Stretch your mind to imagine a life where your production value does not equal the value of your human life. Lastly, attending therapy with a therapist committed to anti-capitalist, feminist practices can help address the underlying mental health issues one might experience without putting blame on the individual for simply existing.
If your therapist is promoting the values of what bell hooks named the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy by telling you that your individual thoughts and emotions are why you’re upset, take a step back. This can often be a form of gaslighting that a lot of professionals unconsciously perpetrate through not educating themselves on identities different than their own. The values of dominant society were never meant to work for the majority of people, and they never will. Without an intersectional feminist lens, therapy even with the best intentions can encourage you to conform to the societal abuse instead of identifying society as the problem. Turning the defeated feelings of depression into social justice rage that fuels action is a much better solution since we can then work to create social change rather than pointing the knives at ourselves. Prioritizing connecting back to the seasons, our environments, and our people can recharge us enough to survive through the winter until the sun returns. These capitalist issues do not go away when the sun comes back out, but temporarily slowing down and meeting the unmet needs SAD traits are alerting us towards is a start.
Sources
American Psychiatric Association (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.).
Kurlansik, S., L., & Ibay, A. D. (2012) Seasonal affective disorder. American Family Physician 86(11), 1037-1041.