Title: Living with SAD: practicing cultures of seasonality to 'feel light' differently.
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: To enable an interdisciplinary collaboration between arts and humanities, social science and clinical academics to produce world-class scholarship and pathways to research impact in relation to Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). This distinctive mix of collaborative research and arts-led public engagement activities orientates around the following research objectives: 1. To engage with how people embody and narrate 'seasonal affect' through experiences of lightness-darkness, prevailing weather systems and changing seasonal ecologies, across the life-course and tracked through the seasons of one year. 2. To explore the role that a creative geohumanities approach can play in collating experiential accounts to facilitate insight into and possible mitigation of the emotional disorder that people may experience in response to changing qualities of light, climate, weather and seasonality. 3. To develop and test a supportive educational intervention, using cultural geographies techniques, culminating in the modification of an existing CBT-based life skills course (LTTF: www.llttf.com) and adapted for people experiencing depression on a SAD spectrum. LTTF resources are proven to improve mood and anxiety, with nothing currently available for SAD (Williams et al, 2018). The main objectives of the proposed research are both public and academic, and can be specified: Public objectives: i) to counter the lack of public resources available to help diverse publics living with both clinically-confirmed SAD and self-defined disruptive seasonal affects; ii) to address the discrediting of SAD experience in clinically informed public discourse and media, and; iii) to create new cultural spaces for the voices of those with lived experience of SAD and to collate and analyse their stories for social purpose. To meet these public objectives, this innovative research collaboration seeks to bring together cultural geohumanities with psychosocial psychiatry and CBT practices to produce a programme of research with defined cultural and educational outcomes. Such objectives will enable new learning from narrative data collection, while recruited participants' evaluation of creative geohumanities practices will inform the design of a new self-help resource for people experiencing SAD or related affects, potentially reaching over 20,000 people in the UK via the NHS approved online LLTTF website. A broadcast quality diary of seasonal affects and resilience strategies will be developed and networked via existing contacts with BBC radio producers. Academic objectives: i) to understand how cultural geography/geohumanities and practice-based ways of knowing can meaningfully contribute to CBT approaches designed to address and resolve low mood; ii) to address silence on the lived experience of SAD in the medical sciences, directly overcoming the apparent lack of relevant qualitative data in addressing SAD as an ongoing 'public health challenge' (Rohan, 2009, p7); iii) to set a new research and methodological agenda for interdisciplinary research between cultural geohumanities and psychosocial psychiatry in a time of environmental crisis and climate change. The collaboration in this research programme is designed to add value via interdisciplinary learning. Clinical studies on SAD lack sufficient attention to the specificity of the geographical relations and imaginations involved in the lived experience of SAD. Directly contributing narrative and creative learning to clinical resources and publications will maximise academic value. The long-term benefit of the interdisciplinary learning through this collaboration and innovation is required in an era of 'climate emergency'. The research team conjoins academic, artistic and clinical expertise and will be at the forefront of designing geographically sensitive interventions for public mental in an era of climate change, with an emphasis on building ECR education.

Lay abstract: Picture the scene. It's one we can all identity with, at some level: late October. The clocks have gone back. The mornings are colder and certainly looking darker. Light itself feels like a precious and endangered thing. A shift is underway. Marked by a downturn in energy and mood, it's tougher to get up for work, feels harder to think clearly, or to muster much in the way of enthusiasm. During the worst spells, there's an unmistakable feeling of sinking ... Feelings associated with the changing seasons, and moods that seem to be governed by the nature of the weather overhead and related qualities of natural light, are a phenomenon known to us all. Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is an intensified form of this lived experience that, for considerable numbers of people in the UK, can be debilitating and limiting, resulting in emotional challenges, lowered mood, and feelings of anxiety. This research project enters the lived experience of SAD, seeking to examine its occurrence and impacts in individuals' life-worlds. Working closely with people who self-identify as experiencing depression on a SAD spectrum, the research team will develop narrative, creative and therapeutic-educational resources more fully to examine and reflect SAD experiences, and to build a self-help programme to be hosted by the NHS-approved website, 'Living Life to the Full', to which over 40,000 people register annually. The programme will offer a range of well-being interventions to mitigate against negative experiences of lightness-darkness and changing seasons, in both urban and rural environments. The research team combines differing skills and approaches, suited to interdisciplinary practice and public engagement. It is comprised of cultural geographers and a creative arts-health practitioner, jointly working with a cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) expert. By focusing attention on SAD as a widely experienced, but poorly understood, affective phenomenon, the research project will have considerable public impact, initiating national conversations about addressing questions of how to live well through altered seasonal patterns and envisaging the sorts of adaptive life skills and cultural tools required for the mental health challenges now associated with global climate change. A network of project partnerships held with national-level organisations will leverage our finding to create meaningful 'national conversations' on mental health, sustainability and climate resilience in the public sector. Our partners - an expert advisory group - will ensure strategic input to the project, and have already helped us identify clear pathways to generate research impact. In future times, we all might be at risk of feeling SAD in relation to changing climate conditions (stormier weather and smoke-filled darker skies) and this project offers targeted resources to help mitigate these affects, as well as offering guided ways to increase creative and embodied connections between people and outdoor environments.

Research activity codes: 5.6 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND BEHAVIOURAL;7.1 INDIVIDUAL CARE NEEDS
Health categories: MENTAL HEALTH