Episode 1: The child
For several years my young daughter had stopped learning in school after the clocks changed. Then we spent a month in Australia in winter (their summer). The improvement in my daughter’s school performance after we got back was astonishing. It wasn’t the same child. When we took her to a photobiology meeting in Florida in June, she was bouncing off the walls, and the light of the situation hit me. She had Seasonal Affective Disorder (the SAD syndrome). The reaction in June was the manic phase. SAD had been recently reported by Rosenthal at NIH and was a subject at photobiology meetings. Thereafter my daughter’s academic work was satisfactory in the winter after light therapy (a special lamp). Experiments showed that the light exposure to the eyes was the trigger affecting mental functioning. Light on the skin had no effect on the SAD syndrome.