Treating Seasonal Affective Disorder With Aromatherapy

Kim Gamlin – 8/02/01

Currently the accepted treatment for relieving the symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), which may include severe and persistent depression, torpor, low libido, carbohydrate craving and weight gain, is intense light therapy. Whilst many people feel great relief with this treatment, some still do not feel as well as they would in summer. But there may be a link between the treatment and management of SAD, and aromatherapy.

Teodor Postolache, a practising psychiatrist in Washington DC, believes so. He’s been conducting a series of studies convinced that this condition can be more effectively treated with a combination of intense light therapy and a form of aromatherapy, rather than light therapy alone.

Aromatherapists have long held that the mind, via the emotions, responds to aroma. But how does aromatherapy affect mood? When any substance is inhaled, the olfactory nerve is stimulated providing a direct pathway to the brain’s limbic system, or emotional ‘control centre’. This primitive area of the brain, also a gateway to the subconscious, is involved with memory, emotion, mood expression and instinctual behaviours relating to such things as self-preservation. Odour stimuli in the limbic system trigger the release of various neurotransmitters such as cartooning, encephalin and endorphins, which help to increase feelings of well-being and regulate mood.

Aromatherapists speak of ‘psycho-aromatherapy’ to describe the powerful effect essential oils, have on the psyche. Aromatherapists consider body and mind intrinsically related, and essential oils, which are extracted from the aromatic material of plants, work holistically on the person. They have the ability to effectively treat the mind in psychosomatic conditions, such as those arising from stress. Physical illness that leads to emotional distress, can also benefit from aromatherapy. Enhanced emotional well-being and a more positive mindset, can then enhance physical health.

Psychological effects of aroma vary from person to person due to individual associations with inhaled odours: the same aroma may be considered attractive to one person, enhancing creative performance and evoking happy memories, yet rejected by another, stimulating unpleasant mood states.

In psycho-aromatherapy, it’s crucial that the odour of the essential oil is welcomed. One (non-Postolache) study has shown that when an odour is perceived as pleasant, a wave of electrical activity is initiated in the right hemisphere of the brain, home of imagination, creativity and aesthetic awareness.

Interestingly enough, Postolache has found that the more depressed SAD clients felt, the less accurate they were at identifying odours presented to the right nostril (olfactory sensors in the right nostril send messages to the right side of the brain). However, almost without exception in summer, SAD cases overall had a more acute sense of smell than control cases. While these studies are inconclusive and in their infancy as larger numbers of sufferers of SAD need to be included, they do seem to suggest a link between seasonal depression and olfaction.

In a case early in the 1990s, one of Postolache’s clients found that in autumn, when she started to sink into her seasonal depression, she could hardly detect her husband’s body odour when he returned from the gym. But as her depression lifted, in the spring, she would suddenly begin to notice it again.

For many animals seasonality is common, as shown in winter hibernation, and olfaction plays an important role. Hamsters largely lose their sense of when to build nests and hibernate without their olfactory bulbs. At one time resting during winter is likely to have been important for human survival. Postolache suggests that perhaps as humans evolved we lost some genes resulting in some loss of seasonality and sense of smell, and speculates that people affected by seasonal changes also preserved this heightened sense of smell.

In aromatherapy, many essential oils often used as anti-depressants, such as jasmine, rose, neroli, rosemary and lavender, are extracted from plants that flower most prolifically in spring and summer. Perhaps for SAD sufferers, combining bright light therapy with personalised psycho-aromatherapy’ consultations in late summer could provide a more effective treatment. With the use of uplifting essential oils their metabolisms could be fooled into leapfrogging hibernation, believing they had already arrived in the scent of spring.

Kim Gamlin is an Aromatherapist/Massage Therapist and a graduate of the Clinic of Natural Medicine in Christchurch.