Have another helping of schadenfreude with your Seattle coffee, Mo.
BUSH'S WIN ADDS TO SEATTLE'S GLOOM
MOOD-CRUSHING WINTERTIME ARRIVES, AND JOLT OF COFFEE MAY NOT HELP
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post
SEATTLE - It has been a SAD week in Seattle, city of rain, darkness, caffeine, secularism and an 82 percent majority that voted in vain to fire President Bush.
SAD, as just about everybody here knows, is an acronym for seasonal affective disorder, the mood-crushing curse of wintertime existence in the northernmost major U.S. city in the Lower 48. An estimated 20 to 30 percent of residents experience some degree of the disorder, which researchers believe is triggered by the body's reaction to reduced natural light. Symptoms include sadness, irritability, gluttony, weight gain, menstrual difficulties and interpersonal strain.
As expected, suffering began last Sunday, with the end of daylight-saving time. Like a guillotine blade, darkness fell at 5 in the afternoon. It was the pitiless annual reminder that by midwinter, there would barely be eight hours of daylight, almost all of it sponged up by thick blankets of concrete-colored clouds that, on average, squat over Seattle 226 days a year.
The next day, election eve, it rained hard. The wind blew, roofs leaked, basements flooded and Seattle seemed to slip irretrievably into the dank funk that has given birth to the SAD resistance movement, otherwise known as excessive caffeine consumption. That movement gave birth to Starbucks and scores of other, lesser-known local purveyors of overpriced coffee.
Then word drizzled out that Bush had won re-election, even though four out of five Seattle voters had cast their ballots for Sen. John Kerry. Electoral maps rubbed in Seattle's blue isolation from the great red sea of the nation's midsection, where exit polls suggested that religion and concern about ``moral values'' played a decisive role in Bush's victory. The Pacific Northwest, with Seattle as its agnostic mecca, is the country's least religious region, with a quarter of the population reporting no church identification.
As election returns sank in, the city's seasonal slough of despond seemed to deepen. A local public radio talk show kicked off a lugubrious afternoon of post-election whining with a saxophone solo of ``Am I Blue?'' Several callers said they would be moving to nearby British Columbia.
David Horsey, the acidic Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, drew a cartoon with Vice President Dick Cheney looking demonic and Bush looking like Alfred E. Neuman. ``The three most frightening words,'' the cartoon said, are ``Four More Years.''
In a letter to the Seattle Times headlined ``Back to the Feudal,'' Barb Becker of Bellevue wrote, ``Announcement to persons arriving in U.S.: `Welcome to America, please turn your watches back 300 years.' ''
Wednesday, shortly after Kerry conceded and Bush gave his victory speech, Deborah Lee, a Seattle nurse who says she has had SAD symptoms for years, felt the time had finally come to medicate with something other than large cups of coffee.
She drove to the Indoor Sun Shoppe in Seattle and paid $300 for a light box, a device that emits light about 20 times brighter than normal room lighting. Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have found that with regular morning use, such lights can reduce SAD symptoms for about 60 percent of patients.
``I haven't gotten suicidal because of Bush,'' said Lee, 47, a Kerry voter. ``For me, it has more to do with the weather. But the election definitely makes it worse.''
Election results struck Seattle at the city's most fragile time of year, psychologically speaking, according to David Avery, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the University of Washington, where the campus counseling center offers free ``light therapy'' to all students.
One of the nation's leading SAD researchers, Avery has investigated the disorder for 15 years and is himself a sufferer sometimes. He has sworn off early morning caffeine, as a result of his research, and replaced it with a ``dawn simulator,'' a device that, beginning at 5:45 each morning, slowly turns up the lights in his bedroom.
``Had the election taken place in July and Kerry had lost, people in Seattle would have been unhappy, but it would not have impacted their energy or concentration or sleep or whatever,'' Avery said. ``But for vulnerable people here who have a predisposition to winter depression, this kind of life stress, coming with the arrival of winter, is probably going to affect them more.''
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