Do the short winter days, lack of sunlight and all that cold get you down?

Seasonal affective disorder is a form of depression that affects about half a million Americans each year. The go-to treatment for this disorder is straightforward and simple. Doctors often prescribe time with a light box, which produces light to mimic the sunlight that’s often lacking in winter.

Light boxes give off more light than typical indoor lighting and can help people avoid the winter blues.

But this easy therapy may be less effective than another psychiatry mainstay, talk therapy. New research published in The American Journal of Psychiatry highlights cognitive behavioral therapy as a potentially superior treatment for long-term relief. This therapy explores a patient’s thoughts and behaviors and tries to reshape negative or erroneous thoughts and emotions into more accurate, uplifting patterns.

University of Vermont researchers divided volunteers suffering from seasonal affective disorder into two groups and provided one group with standard light-box therapy. The other participants underwent six weeks of talk therapy.

The scientists kept in touch with the patients for two years, contacting them each winter to suggest therapy for those who needed it and to assess progress. By the second follow-up winter, a trend favoring cognitive behavioral therapy was evident. Talk therapy patients had fewer returning cases of seasonal affective disorder. These patients also saw milder cases than the light-box patients and were more likely to go into remission.

One reason for talk therapy’s better long-term results may be that people using light boxes often fail to do so for more than one winter. Talk therapy builds coping skills, which help people stay well even when dark winter days return.