I finished reading this article, from PsychEducation.org, about how dark therapy might actually supplement (if not actually supplant) medication for managing bipolar disorder. The author of this article falls back on a few different studies that were done, each demonstrating a link between enforced periods of darkness and a reduction in swinging moods. The suggested reason for why this happens, why people with bipolar disorder might benefit from dark therapy, rather than the light therapy given to people with SAD, has to do with our biological clocks. It was a theorized faulty biological clock that researchers were hoping to treat with dark therapy in the first study, as shown by this quote:
“They knew that the a specific part of the hypothalamus, the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), has direct nerve connections from the eyes. It gets direct signals about how much light is out there. And it has been shown to be the main location of the ‘”biological clock”‘ in many animals, including humans. They thought that the SCN might get ‘”desensitized”‘ in some susceptible people by too much light, namely too much artificial light at night.” Read the rest of this entry ?
