Living with Seasonal Affective Disorder: The Wintering Well Programme, 2022-2023

This is a data collections is related to the ESRC 'Living with SAD' research, an interdisciplinary project featuring cultural geography, psychiatry and arts practice.

The purpose for the study was to understand more about the lived experience of SAD with participants who worked with the research team via semi-structured seasonal interviews; seasonal diaries; workshops over one winter; and survey. All this data is deposited in the collection in anonymized form.

In the project and working experimentally with creative practice and across the interdisciplinary expertise, a Wintering Well workshop programme was developed that sought to make an intervention in winter experience for those experiencing seasonal low mood and depression. The data set combines 'before' and 'after' interviews and artistic extracts from creative journals completed as part of the Wintering Well programme.

The data set combines different data: questionnaire and mood survey returns; transcribed interview data, artistic drawings and photographs by research participants.

The findings from the data tell us that seasonal depression affects many aspect of social life and feelings about physical and mental health. The Wintering Well Workshop data combine to suggest that creative interventions in winter experience are meaningful for those people who find themselves on a SAD spectrum in ways that make a positive difference to living in winter and thinking about SAD.