The Current - Struggling with the summer blues? You're not alone

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

While we tend to associate seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, with cold weather and long nights, it is not confined to the winter. Summer SAD is very much a thing. We look at the symptoms, why this happens to certain people and some of the things that can help.

With the help of Google AI, Access Now is mapping Canada's accessible places, empowering the disabled community to explore with confidence. Innovation is Canada's story. Let's tell it together. Find out more at g.co slash Canadian Innovation. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. It is officially summer. Patios are full, swim seasons underway,

schools out for many, many students at the end of this week, and it is finally, finally warming up. Many of us look forward to this time of the year with great anticipation, but there are some people who find the warmer months particularly tough on their mental health. Everyone's like, yay, summer, we can do things, you can do a patio, let's socialize, let's go to concerts, let's do outside things. For me, it's just like, ugh, I tend to hermit a bit in the summer

because it's too hot. I'm just, I'm melting to death. It's almost unbearable. I find it a lot easier to move through the world in winter than I do in summer. A lot of times I'll have to cancel plans if it's too hot. I just become a whole other agitated person. And then you're like, what is my issue? Like, I'm just a little hot.

Why am I like this? We tend to associate seasonal affectile disorder or sad with cold weather and long nights, but it is not confined to the winter. Somersad is a real struggle for certain people. Megan Carty knows all about this. Megan's a producer here on The Current, and they join me in our Toronto studio. Good morning.

Good morning. These are early days of summer. It's just begun. There's a lot of summer left to go. How are you doing? I'm okay, hanging in there. I don't want to be a party pooper and stomp on all the summer people's buzz,

but this is a tough time of year for me. And it can make me feel out of sync with the rest of the world because just as everyone else seems to be coming alive and thriving, my mental health is plunging. I didn't even know SummerSad was a thing until recently because no one ever

talks about it. But working on this story really opened my eyes to the fact that I'm not alone. Even though it's much less mainstream than winter sad, there are others who struggle with this. So tell me more about that because we know about winter seasonal effect of disorder. How does the summer version of that compare? Yeah, so I want to introduce you to Simon Sherry. He's a registered clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology and neuroscience at Dalhousie University. He also assesses and treats people on a week-to-week basis. This comes up, typically the winter version of a seasonal effective disorder, but over the years I've come to appreciate, there's often a seldom discussed and poorly understood summer variant of the seasonal affective disorder as well.

And this doesn't fit well with a lot of Canadians because we are long suffering. There are winters and their darkness, and so you expect Canadians to come alive with the arrival of spring and summer and heat and humidity. But for some, it creates some serious problems. asked Simon to break down some of the core symptoms of seasonal effective disorder. So for the winter version, the bear goes into the cave. This is very much like a hibernation type state. You might see oversleeping, you might see overeating, and a general tendency toward social withdrawal. In contrast, with this summer onset pattern, you're going to see problems sleeping, difficulties with appetite more around eating too little, anxiety,

restlessness and agitation are often part of that presentation as well. So they both have a seasonal pattern of onset. Some of the core symptoms are different and maybe even opposite. I definitely struggle with all of the summer ones he's talking about, especially during a heat wave. And I will say it's gotten a lot worse over the years as climate change makes extreme heat events more common. I was living in Vancouver during the heat dome and let me tell you it was rough. Simon and the other experts I spoke with expressed concern that as summers get hotter, more people are going to be affected by summer sad. And so you spoke with some of those people.

What did they tell you? I was actually surprised by the number of people who responded to my call out. I spoke with people across the country in Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver, Halifax, and Toronto. So clearly there are lots of other Canadians out there who also struggle with this. Here's Mark Manning from Calgary. I find that the heat really does play a big effect on me. I'm a bigger guy. I'm a hairier guy.

So when it's plus 25 to 28 out there, it feels a lot warmer to me than it does to, I think, to a lot of other people. And this dehydrates me quicker. This makes my joints hurt faster. So it becomes this like physical and mental exhaustion that is almost too much sometimes. My mother gets mad at me for this. but I will spend like one day every weekend that I have off just hiding in my apartment with like all the window shades down just because I'm trying to relax and not feel so anxious about this kind of overwhelming hot, dense air that's just unpleasant to move through. Is that something that sounds familiar hiding from the summer in your apartment? Very familiar. I couldn't help but laugh when Mark told me this and how it makes his mother crazy.

I can literally hear my mom asking me during our Sunday night phone call, did you get outside this weekend? And me being like, hmm. Another thing Mark talked about was how much more self-conscious in his body he feels in summer, compared to other seasons when he can layer up. I don't know if this might be too of extreme a word, but it almost makes me feel embarrassed. There's almost like a confidence that you need to have to really enjoy summer.

Not everyone can pull off a pair of Daisy Dukes, you know? If I could, I would. but I dislike summer because of the insecurity it brings out. This insecurity, Mark, speaks of, also came up in my conversation with August Winter from Vancouver. Sometimes audibly when I exit a building in the middle of the day, I go like, oh, like it just feels like a spotlight is on me, both like heat-wise, but I would say more so emotionally,

it makes me feel very exposed to bring into the conversation also being like a trans person. and it's, I would love to be able to wear t-shirts or tank tops and feel comfortable, but I don't. And so I think there's like that added layer as well of like, I own very few shorts. I own very few like things that show my body. And I think that's an added layer of summer for me too. It's like, ah, I'm going to have to face this part of myself every time I want to be comfortable. You know, it's interesting. One of the things we heard earlier is that you're familiar with the winter blues in Canada.

and people just go and hibernate. But this is the season where people are supposed to be out and they're doing things. And that you wait for this over the course of the winter. We have a lot of winter in Canada. And then people want summer. And so how does that fear of missing out impact people who have summertime depression?

Yeah. Every person I spoke to who deals with Somersad talked about this. Like you're saying, it's just, it's so much more normalized to be sad in Hermit in the wintertime. But in summer, there's this underlying pressure making us feel like we should be having a great time and making the most of it. Culturally, it's just a season that is so rife with expectations, and that can be really heavy for people like August and Mark.

The obligation that the entire world seems to throw at you, that when there's no snow outside, when it's not cold, you have to be out doing something. That adds like a strange level of anxiety to a situation that already is difficult to move through, for me. It's this general feeling of like, I'm not a part of something that it seems like everyone else is really enjoying. And I think at the end of the summer, if we hold this expectation that it should be the pinnacle of our year, it sparks that question of like, am I missing my life? It really goes there for me of like, what am I, am I enjoying my life when I see everyone else

seeming to right now? There's also a lack of awareness around Somersad that can really really grind on people who struggle with it. Simon Sherry, who we met earlier, told me it's not something practitioners are always attuned to either. This is a counter-stereotypic problem, and I think it doesn't garner a lot of empathy or compassion. On top of that, I'm quite convinced that this pattern is often missed in a place like Canada, because we don't lean in and ask because we're not particularly well-trained, and it doesn't fit at all with our stereotypes and expectations.

And I would want to say this. More psychologists, psychiatrists, or other professionals should ask about this. Your client is not necessarily going to show up in your office and say, I have a summer onset major depressive disorder. This is not a widely held concept. But if you ask the right questions and probe in an objective way, there are clearly a subset of people who suffer from this problem. Do we know why this happens to that subset of people?

It's important to mention that since. Somersad is a lot less research than Winter's sad. It is a lot less understood. But Simon says the leading culprit is believed to be the change in our exposure to sunlight and how it can disrupt the body's circadian rhythm. We have an internal biological clock. And whether it's too little or too much sunlight experience by a brain, that can change some of our fundamentals. If that biological clock, that circadian rhythm goes wrong, it can result in the dysregulation of mood. It can result through the disturbance of sleep, it can change the regulation of hormones.

So we're talking about very fundamental shifts within the biology of a human. With the help of Google AI, CropMind is giving farmers early and accurate insights on crop health, helping them protect their harvests and increase yields. Innovation is Canada's story. Let's tell it together. Find out more at g.co slash Canadian innovation.

Jane Goodall had one last message for Canadians. I'm inviting you to take part in Jane Goodall's Hike for Hope. Let's take action for the planet and let's take it together. Sign up at hikefor hope.ca. So you spoke with one of the people who coined this term, Seasonal Effective Disorder. What did you learn about the role that Somersad played in those early stages when we were just starting to talk about this?

Yeah, I was really excited when he returned my call. His name is Norman Rosenthal. And he led the team. that coined the term sad in the early 80s. I'll just give you a bit of his backstory because it's super interesting. He moved to the U.S. from South Africa in 1976 for a psychiatry residency in New York City. And he noticed he and his wife were experiencing changes to their mood during winter that they never had in South Africa. He saw that for three years before becoming a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, or the NIH.

And that's where he met Thomas Ware, who also noticed seasonal changes to his mood during wintertime. The two of them decided to go to the media asking for others who experience this, and they got a huge response from all over the country. I'll let Rosenthal take it from here. So at that time, the mood disorders were called affective disorders. So I thought, well, let's call it seasonal effective disorder because it had that nice acronym SAD. And I was the lead author in that first paper in 1984. And then we replicated it a couple of times. And then other groups also replicated it.

And then, as they say in the United States, it became a thing. Although at the beginning, it was met with quite a lot of contempt, which kind of made it more fun when they had to finally acknowledge that it existed. It's important to note, though, that at first they were only attributing sad to cyclical winter depression. So where did the summer part come in? So after the media call out, they sent out questionnaires to everyone who'd responded. and some people wrote in claiming to have the opposite. So depression in the summer and improved mood in the winter.

They then gathered all those people together for a separate stream of research, which helped them identify the core features of Somersat. So agitation, restlessness, insomnia, reduced appetite and weight loss, as we heard about earlier. He told me every time he would go on the radio to talk about Wintersad, this happened. The people who had winter depression were mostly too lethargic, to respond and call in to call shows. But the summer people were very happy to be calling in

because they had lots of energy. It was the middle of the winter, and it wasn't their bad season. And they would say, I'm exactly the opposite. You know, I can't stand the summer. So what does Rosenthal make of the renewed interest in looking at Somerset? Well, he's been working in this field for over 20 years. He just recently retired from the NIH. And while he's disappointed that research into this aspect of seasonal

effective disorder hasn't always gotten its dues, he does see the potential for more interest, particularly as we experience more of the extreme impacts of climate change. I definitely do think that as the world gets hotter, people who have trouble in the summer are going to have more trouble. It's just that simple. And so I would be unsurprised if that happens or even surprised if it doesn't happen. So if that's the case, how are practitioners thinking about the impacts of extreme heat on our mental health. I spoke with Amruta Nori Sarma. She's an assistant professor of environmental health and population sciences at the Harvard

T.H. Chan School of Public Health. And her research looks at the psychological impacts of extreme heat exposure. Increasing summertime temperatures were associated with increasing risks of emergency department visits for mental health outcomes. And this was true across all causes of mental health. but also we found increases in the risk of emergency department visits for specific causes, including mood disorders, but also including things like anxiety and stress disorders, substance use disorders, schizophrenia, self-harm, there were a whole host of different types

of mental health events that were linked with increases in summertime temperatures. We think that extreme heat is maybe an exogenous stressor that's exacerbating people's pre-existing conditions. She noted this research was only based on people who had access to commercial health insurance in the U.S. So therefore, likely an undercount of the actual psychiatric emergency department impact of extreme heat exposure. But she hinted at this. What do we know about what it is that can create this condition, what's leading the extreme heat to set off people with underlying mental health conditions?

Yeah, she said sleep disruption is a big part of it. So when it stays hot all night and there's not a cooling off period, that can lead to issues of poor sleep, which can trigger a variety of mental illnesses, including mood disorders. She also talked about medication use. We think that medications might be more or less effective depending on people's temperature exposure. So there's the effectiveness of the medication itself, and then there's the impact that the medication has on the human body's ability to thermoregulate. this is something that came up in a lot of my interviews, how SSRIs, which right now are first-line treatments for depression and other mood disorders, can actually make people even more sensitive to heat since they interfere with the body's ability to cool itself down. So for anybody who's listening who struggles with their mood during the summer, maybe they know somebody else who does, aside from the medications, what can they do? This is what registered clinical psychologist Simon Sherry says.

This can be a serious and disabling problem. So you have to match the magnitude of the problem you're experiencing with the idea there may be some ways to treat or prevent this. For instance, if you have a fairly mild variant of this problem, consider modifying your environment. How can you cool yourself down from closing the blinds to getting access to an air conditioner? So what aspects of your environment are modifiable? I find cold showers to be super helpful, or even just splashing cold water from the sink on the back of my neck and in my hair if I'm starting to overheat. I use blackout curtains in my bedroom and I sleep with a fan very close to my face. Simon also talked about cognitive behavioral therapy, which is a short-term treatment meant to help people modify unhelpful patterns of behavior or thinking.

In the winter, for example, we would teach people not to hide from winter, but, to go public skating or go for a walk or go tobogganing or whatever else might bring enjoyment to your life. I think the same approach, which we might call behavioral activation, is important to summer seasonal affector disorder. Because when you retreat, when you habitually engage in avoidance, you're isolated and you're cut off from sources of reward, pleasure, and positivity. There are also forms of thinking that can prevent people from engaging with their world. So I can never go outside because it's incredibly hot and I'm always miserable. That may often be true, but not always true. And so sometimes we can help people challenge and restructure patterns of thinking that are too extreme.

I'm definitely guilty of this extreme thinking. But talking to Simon and all these other people has really motivated me to work on letting this go. And to make more of an effort to participate in the parts of summer I do enjoy. Things like swimming, canoeing, late night walks, and spending time in nature. Popsicles too and bonfires. Popsicles are good. What has all of this left you with?

I mean, as somebody who lives with this, what has learning about Somersad kind of given you? Honestly, just talking about it and being more open with people about my relationship with Summer has been huge. And to hear others share their experiences has been really validating. I now know I'm not the only one.

And it's helping me be left. hard on myself for struggling to keep up with the pace of summer, or not enjoying the hot, sunny days as much as it feels like I'm supposed to. I'm not going to be afraid anymore to tell people that summer is a difficult season for me. Just like some people get winter seasonal depression, this happens to me in the summer. Megan, thank you very much. Thank you so much. Megan Carty is a producer here on The Current. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name's Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.com. slash podcasts.