The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

Winter Blues, how cold, dark days can take a mental toll.

After last week's look at what winter does in terms of physical symptoms,

I'd be lax not to address the obvious elephant in the room, mental health in the colder, darker season.

I'll admit I don't know too many people who look forward to this time of year past the holidays.

The adventure of winter sports aside, for those who love them, and the chance for a little social hibernation, for those who prefer that, winter can take an exponential toll on people past the new year.

That said, just how much is relative inconvenience versus

clinical reality? Do our moods collectively change? Why do some people experience more significant

effects? What are the real hormonal influences this time of year and what, if anything, can

or should we do about them? To present one novel

research context, even analysis of Google searches seems to point to some kind of seasonal shift

in mental well-being. Researchers studied four years of internet queries across countries in both

the southern and northern hemispheres, and observed that

Internet searches for every major mental illness or condition, everything from schizophrenia

to ADHD, anxiety to OCD, consistently rose during the winter months. While some categories

like searches for bipolar disorder differed by 16 to 18 percent,

others like eating disorders were 37 to 42 percent higher in winter than in summer.

Internet searches for suicide rose 24 to 29 percent in winter compared to summer,

even though actual suicide rates peak in late spring. Of course,

the most common or at least commonly known seasonal response is seasonal effective disorder,

aka sad, an ongoing form of depression in which symptoms annually subside during certain seasons,

usually but not always summer.

...