No clinician wants to be a “pill-pusher,” and most of our patients do not want that kind of treatment. So what can we offer our depressed patients beyond medications?

How convincing is the evidence that light therapy actually works? The pace of research on bright light therapy has accelerated over the last few years, and recently, two meta-analyses of this research have been published, one in the American Journal of Psychiatry, and the other in the web-based Cochrane Library.

f you haven’t started hearing about the “benefits” of blue light therapy yet, you will soon. Blue light boosters argue that it is more effective than white light, and that it is the therapeutic ingredient of standard white light that eases seasonal depression.

Since I had never actually seen a light box in the flesh, I asked some of the larger companies to send me samples for a “review”—not for efficacy but for such qualities as convenience, asthetics, pleasantness, etc…

Wellbutrin XL was approved for the prevention of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), based on the results three studies in which over 1,000 patients with SAD (but who were well at study entry) were randomly assigned to either Wellbutrin XL 150 to 300 mg QD or placebo. Do insurance companies pay for light boxes? Many of them do … or at least they say they do!

Dr. Rosenthal, as the “father” of light therapy, how did you got interested in doing research on seasonal affective disorder?