Children with SAD

To those whose children have SAD -- and to those new people here who have SAD:

My thoughts about this are unconventional and have drawn much criticism here. A few people have said they have found them useful. Like you, I originally came here suffering what I thought were all the signs of full-blown SAD, and for the next several months I did light therapy to death (it did help some), and everything else I could think of to combat it.

I've been through a lot since then. Adventures with antidepressants that left me worse off than I was before I took them. Experiments with various diets, looking for a natural, nutritional approach to healing. Eventually I met a naturopath online who does use diet and nutrition for healing and she helped me a great deal. Most people do not realise how pivotal these things are to human health, how ill a person can get when they are ignored; conversely, how well a person can be when they are right.

I now believe that I see most of the picture with me. The deepest roots of the problem lie in my life circumstances, which are taking me a long time to change but which I am working on. Other things that I have done, like the diet/nutrition approach, removing my mercury amalgam fillings, etc, have certainly helped. But SAD for me was more of a red herring than anything else. What threw me was the seasonal pattern, definitely worse in the wintertime. This can happen with clinical depression, especially if (like me) someone is sensitive to changes in light and seasons. It doesn't always mean that the answer to the symptoms, cut-and-dried no-questions-asked, is SAD.

There are indeed some people who benefit from supplementary light in the winter. My feeling is that this condition is more rare than many people think. I have been talking on this forum for almost 3 years and I am firmly of the belief that almost everyone here has other factors mixed in. It is of course their choice to address these or not, to continue to look for answers or to dig their feet in and "cope" year after year as best they can. Again, I imagine these kinds of comments are going to draw a lot of criticism, but they are my honest thoughts.

It is always important to look at the role of diet in one's life, especially in children, not just for SAD but for other symptoms of ADHD or bipolar. These can often be caused by food allergies, food additives, too much junk food and not enough of the good stuff like fruit and veg. I am a teacher and I can attest firsthand to the deterioration in behaviour after lunch, when many children have filled themselves up with chocolate, crisps and sweet fizzy drinks.

There are of course many other options to explore too. I have put a number of these together in the Nutrition Info topic. You can look at things like medical conditions (hypothyroidism, hypoglycemia, hormone imbalances for example), environmental poisoning, amalgam & vaccine illness, etc etc. I would suggest you work with a good naturopath with knowledge of nutritional and environmental medicine to try to get at the roots of the problem.

My two cents'. Take it or leave it, but I hope someone will find it useful.

Live in the light.
Linda.

Hello, first of all I would like to say I landed upon this place while looking for information on some other subjects, then I decided to get along some of the posts here and was bewildered to know about this specific problem. Yes this is something which I had never heard before and do not know if anyone in our community is suffering from the same either. My god how many varieties of ailments are there! God take mercy on these kids!