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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

When I lived in Seattle, my solution was a 2’ square fluorescent panel I got from a gardening supply place called “The Indoor Sun Shop”. I grew up in the South and got real bad seasonal depression up there; it probably saved my life. I paid all of $300 for it. Plus like twenty bucks for a mechanical timer, because I discovered that there were a lot of mornings where I was too depressed and mopey to turn it on myself. I kept it in the home office I worked in and it did a lot to shut up that little voice that suggested killing myself as the solution to every problem.

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I wonder how much the traditional British pessimism has to do with the fact our winters are an SAD magnet if there ever was one, very short days due to the high latitude and the kind of grey soul-penetrating dampness of it being just cold enough to make you miserable but not cold enough for the ground to ever properly freeze for long. I definitely found taking vitamin D supplements helps with the seasonal blues, I'd try a daylight simulating lamp but I have quite severe photophobia issues.

Would you tell us a little about your photophobia, I've never heard of anyone having that before. Thank you.

I’m not the parent commenter, but I’ve heard ‘photophobia’ used to refer to the sort of extreme light sensitivity experienced by migraine sufferers: not a ‘fear of light’ per se, but rather the perception of bright light as an unpleasant or even painful stimulus.

I have a neurological disorder called visual snow syndrome that's the root cause, nobody really understands where it comes from but the current theory is a dysfunction of metabolism in part of the visual cortex. It causes all sorts of weird visual stuff like the eponymous 'tv snow' and other distortions as well as intractable headaches, apparently it has similarities with certain kinds of migraine. As for the photophobia it's quite a difficult sensation to describe but for me its acute form is an unusual sensation that's in the same category as pain without being pain itself - it's like the sensation of looking directly at the sun but with ordinary light sources that don't bother other people. The chronic form is less intense, it basically just makes concentrating in a bright environment exhausting after a while and it trashes my focus, making me headachy and irritable. As a result I never have strong lights on even at night, and I also don't drive in the dark because the glare from the headlights can mess up my vision for minutes at a time which is obviously not safe.

Fluorescent tubes are among the worst offenders for messing with my concentration, though anything with a pronounced 50 Hz flicker or too high a colour temperature isn't great for me. The kind of cheap lights offices traditionally use are particularly bad which is part of why I'm full time WFH now!

Thanks for explaining.

there was a post a day or two ago about vitamin D3, as well as academic literature finally catching up to medical science vis a vis vitamin D3.

I won't cite, but only because i don't have a way to index my personal PDF repository, but the common consensus among people who study such things is that anyone living above the 20th parallel (or below, technically) absolutely must supplement vitamin D3, as even a full day in the sun naked is not enough to synthesize the amount of D3 we need.

So with that in mind, I'd honestly expect more people to know this and be supplementing D3. I don't have any specific recommendations, but i do know some guidelines and recent discoveries into "max dosing", so here they are. Anecdotally, i take 5000-6000iu every two days. I have a weird sleeping schedule so i really only notice "a day" as the sort of fog and fatigue i get after having gone more than 30 hours without D3. Prior to about 2015 or so, the max dosage was in the sub-5000iu range, with most supplement's labels stating that 500-1000iu was the "RDA" for D3.

However since covid was exponentially responsible for research into literally anything that could help alleviate symptoms/the disease and accelerate the time to recovery, some doctors were giving extremely high iu, up to 250,000iu over the course of a few days, or single doses of 50,000-80,000iu, with no deleterious effects reported.

Personally, unless i actually get sick, i try to stay under 8000-10000iu, at least until someone does a longitudinal study about the long term effects of doses higher than that.

As to the article and your point about lights helping - i've never noticed anything about any sort of light. I can feel awful at noon on a clear day while outside, or awful inside under every light type imaginable. I'm glad that light (and types of lights) help some people. I just think that the root cause is D3 deficiency, and no amount of 20k lumen arrays is really going to help.

As a quick aside, if you want to supplement children with D3 i recommend finding chewable d3 or a childrens multi-vitamin with omega-3/6 fatty acids. A couple of studies (with decent N and correlations) showed that merely supplementing omegas in children's diets improved the relationship and overall wellbeing of the children's parents - you read me right, parents didn't have to supplement to get the benefits of the children supplementing.

All I've heard is the danger of calcium precipitating out of your blood and causing arterial blockages. Apparently D3 potentiates this so that the concentration of blood-borne calcium doesn't need to be as high for this to begin.

I've always been wary of going up to max-dose levels for that reason.

with the way research is going i'd expect to find it's something else in conjunction with D3 that causes that, and not merely D3. like D3 and a high sodium diet, or D3 and <some local thing>.

as mentioned though, i only think that 500-1000iu is not enough for most people. I'm not a doctor though, but it is one avenue of alleviating SAD as well as lethargy and stuff that most people vape/smoke/caffeinate to deal with.

You should take D3 with vitamin K2 (talk with your doctor first if you're on blood-thinning medications) to avoid calcium being dumped into soft tissues (K2 ensures it preferentially goes into bones).

It's a good idea to get your vitamin D status tested yearly and aim to be at least 50 ng/ml (120 nmol/l), but not more than 80 ng/ml (200 nmol/l).

As an example for dosages: I take about 7000 IU of vitamin D3 and 180 mcg of vitamin K2 daily. My levels test at about 180 nmol/l and my blood calcium is normal.

How did you determine that ratio of D3 to K2?

If you are going to supplement D3 over 5000iu, I would recommend getting a 25(OH)D blood test once or twice a year, ideally 2-3 months after each change in dose. Then compare your levels to the levels here and adjust dosage accordingly: https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/vitamind-healthprofessiona...

It may also be worth adjusting dosage between winter and summer months, depending on the amount of outdoor activity you do.

Surely you don't mean the 20th parallel, right? That would include most of the population of the world wouldn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_parallel_north

yes, 20th does include most of the world population. Humans started out within 20 degrees of the equator for the vast majority of human history, and eventually fanned out, but it takes longer than a couple thousand years to make up for the loss in D3 synthesis.

edit: it could be 25th or 30th, i have a hard time finding a single paper amongst thousands, either way it includes 90% of the population of the US, regardless of what parallel.

I was taking a lot of vitamin D in Seattle! That took some of the edge off the depression but I still started wanting to kill myself all the time after a couple months of endless grey skies and drizzle, and it came earlier every winter.

The lamp helped for a while but the suicidal urges kept creeping back over the years, until I finally moved back south. The urge to kill myself has pretty much entirely vanished now.

There is, I suspect, no one single cure for seasonal depression. Lights help, massive D3 doses help, vacations in sunnier places help, and there’s probably a ton of other biological factors helped by me living in the sunny place I grew up in versus Seattle.

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