I take vitamin D now but wasn't aware at the time. I never used the light therapy lamp but I had plenty of Italian colleagues that used one. The first time I encountered one of these things, I thought Apple had released some kind of new imac that I hadn't heard off yet. Until somebody explained to me that "no, that's a Philips bright light". Basically you wear some sun goggles and stare at it for fifteen minutes or so while you are blasted with what is indeed very bright.
The dark/light situation never affected me that much. But I could definitely see it in people around me. People from further south have a hard time dealing with darkness. Insomnia is something to guard for.
The Finnish are famously one of the most happy people around. But they also have relatively high suicide rates that spike in spring when after a miserably long winter, the availability of light pushes some people over the edge. As I used to morbidly joke, "Finland is so happy because all the unhappy people keep killing themselves thus removing themselves from these surveils". The Finnish love dark humor like that. This got a chuckle out some of them.
It's true that depression and suicides peak in the spring (Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder), but that's the case all over the world. Finland is far from the worst in suicide statistics: within Europe, the unfortunate outliers are Slovenia and Lithuania, followed by Hungary. The situation is worse than in Finland also in Belgium, Croatia and Estonia (plus the US). France and Latvia have the same numbers as Finland. Only marginally better are Serbia, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Czechia and Switzerland.
Meanwhile, the fortunate outliers are more in the south: Cyprus, Greece, Liechtenstein, Türkiye, Italy and Luxembourg.
The dark/light situation never affected me that much. But I could definitely see it in people around me. People from further south have a hard time dealing with darkness. Insomnia is something to guard for.
The Finnish are famously one of the most happy people around. But they also have relatively high suicide rates that spike in spring when after a miserably long winter, the availability of light pushes some people over the edge. As I used to morbidly joke, "Finland is so happy because all the unhappy people keep killing themselves thus removing themselves from these surveils". The Finnish love dark humor like that. This got a chuckle out some of them.