Study title

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.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...